5 Best Uses Of Time Travel In Television

TV & Film

Mar 1

*A distorted clock face in a portal*
Image Source: Campfire

Time travel is a common trope on television, but some shows use it better than others. Time travel needs to have clear rules even if those rules aren’t clear to the audience. Here are some of the best shows that use time travel well.

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5: Quantum Leap

*Promotional poster for Quantum Leap*
Image Source: IMDB

Quantum Leap decides to keep time travel more mysterious. Sam winds up in the past in a time-travel experiment gone wrong. When he sees himself for the first time, he realizes he doesn’t look like himself. Instead, he is leaping through bodies to travel through time. So any time travel he does is in the body of someone who was already present in the past. This is a simple but effective way to prevent the paradox of meeting your parents before they’re born or any other similar issues with time travel.

The show’s time travel mechanic fell a little short, however, as the rules seemed to change per episode, which was a standard practice before the days of binge-watching. The 2022 reboot cleans things up a little bit and reveals a sort of pattern to time travel. Another character Dr. Song was able to leap through time and merge with his host. This is known as quantum entanglement. Both the original series and the reboot are available to watch on Peacock and Philo. The reboot is available on Netflix.

4: Outlander

*Claire and Jamie in Outlander*
Image Source: Vanity Fair

Outlander is the story of a woman named Claire from 1945 who finds herself falling in love in the year 1743. In this show, time travel is very strict. It’s a genetic ability, limiting it to a few certain families and requires the travelers to be in certain locations. These limitations prevent people from just messing up the timestream whenever they feel like it. Another key aspect of time travel is the closed time loop.

In other words, what happened will always happen. Travelers can’t change the events of the past. While it may be the present for them, whatever they did in the past is already history. Outlander’s eighth and final season will be released on March 6, 2026.

3: The Way Home

*Alice kneeling by the pond in The Way Home*
Image Source: Fangirlish

Hallmark’s The Way Home, a bit of a unicorn for the channel, follows similar rules. Time travel is a genetic trait that so far applies only to the Landry family. Much like Outlander, the Landry’s have to find a portal. The only portal is a pond on their property. Travelers can go backwards but never forwards in time. The pond takes them where they need to go, but it has to be the right time to travel. This show also follows the “what happened will always happen” rule. This is brought to genius effect when after searching through evidence from when her brother went missing, Kat enters the pond and ends up leaving the same evidence behind. There’s another trick to this pond.

Although only Landrys can time travel, they can bring someone with them if they jump into the pond together. So those in the present can travel to the past with a Landry, but no Landrys can bring someone from the past to the present. This keeps the time loop closed and stable. The Way Home is preparing to air its fourth and final season on Hallmark on April 19, 2026 and the next day on Hallmark+. The first three seasons are available on Netflix, and the show made it into the top ten in the first week of streaming.

2: Loki

*Loki with the TVA*
Image Source: The Spool

The Loki series introduces the Time Variance Authority (TVA) to the MCU. THe TVA is responsible for maintaining the Sacred Timeline. Unlike the previous examples, paradoxes and incursions abound in Loki, but this organization is dedicated to eliminating branches of the timeline to make sure everything happens as it needs to happen. Whether the TVA is villainous or virtuous is largely left up to interpretation. Where Loki shines is where the TVA fails.

Different versions of the characters meeting and living through different timelines offers a fun look at what happens when time travel goes horribly wrong. Both seasons of Loki are available on Disney Plus

1: Doctor Who

*The Tardis*
Image Source: Bleeding Cool

Doctor Who invented a variety of ways to time travel, but the most iconic is traveling via the police box called the Tardis. The Tardis is used by a Time Lord known as the Doctor who keeps reincarnating. The Doctor experiences time in a nonlinear way calling it “a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.” With the various ways time travel is possible in this universe, it can be confusing to viewers, but the show has been running successfully since 1963 with an engaged audience and a reboot on Disney Plus.

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