Predestination - Time Travel in a Mobius strip

Predestination produced by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig released to theaters in mid-2014 featuring Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook and known to be a mind-boggling movie in the time and movie was wrapped around time-traveling characters going through space and time back and forth like going around a block.

The story is very confusing because the movie is not like a normal time traveling movies like Back to the Future, this time it has a Mobius strip-like time travel I'll explain this later in the article.

Not only this movie does this crazy Mobius strip-like time travel it breaks all the major time-traveling rules in the guidebook (Note: There’s no such thing as a time-traveling guide book and also time traveling has not proved possible or not, yet to be discovered).


Actually human does perform some kind of time travel but not pure time traveling like think,

If you’re an astronaut who went to the internal space station and let's say, you spend there for six months because the ISS (International Space Station) is traveling so fast the phenomenon called time dilation happens and this leads to that person being 0.007 seconds younger than the people on the earth who are relatively still to the ISS. This is not the time traveling because this is just one person is aging faster than the other kind of thing. That's why this is called Time Dilation.

Movies actually exaggerate the concept of time traveling to clear it apart from the other time-traveling movie and so they pushed their imaginations to come up with a mind-boggling movie to mess with your brain.

Let’s take a look at the plot of the story,

The story is about a person who's been assigned by a secret organization to change something disaster happened in the past.

So the ‘Barkeep’  (Ethan Hawke) is the agent assigned by this secret organization to prevent a bomb blast happened in New York City killing over 10000 people clearing 10 blocks from the city.  who was chosen to prevent the bomb?

But the problem with the time-traveling is if you ever change something in the past and it’s going to affect the current present you're in. So interacting with you're past is very dangerous in terms of time-traveling. So what I did in this post is explaining the chronological order of the scenes, so you can get the idea about the story they are trying to convey, so let's begin.

So I'm gonna start from the scene where Jane was left at the orphanage when she was an infant

This is a simplified story of the Time Traveler

01 Jane(infant) was left at an orphanage by a man in a coat that doesn't reveal his/her face.
From then she grew up there until she becomes a teenager.

02 She went for a job interview to be a space stewardess who serves astronaut.
She has ultimately failed the interview even though she was the best in the group.

03 After that Jane went for school to learn etiquette and there she met this handsome guy she eventually fell in love.
a. She was abandoned by this guys and left with a child

04 Jane's child was kidnapped by someone in a coat that doesn't reveal his/her face.
She had to undergo surgery for gender transfer because her uterus was removed in her delivery and she had fully developed male organs her body. (She becomes He)

05 He settled himself as a write
He starts writing women's confession stories and did "the confession of an unmarried mother"

06 He went to a bar one day and met this Barkeep to whom he's now telling the story.

This is one part of the Chain or I would like to call this as one half of the strip and I made this illustration where you will be able to easily break down the scenes chronologically.

What is a Mobius strip?

Mobius strip only has 1 side, unlike ribbon that has 2 sides. To make a Mobius strip out of a ribbon you have to cut a ribbon in half and turn one end 180 degrees and connect them back together then you will get a Mobius strip-like in the following picture.

Mobius strip has some qualities that we can compare with the timeline of this movie like for an example:

• It's a loop and it has only one side - The life of John Jane is a never stopping loop that keeps happening until John being able to successfully defuse the bomb.

• It looks like it has a joint in the middle but there isn't - After Jane had the baby(Jane) was kidnapped and left at the orphanage this is the joint effect, but at the same time, Jane becomes john and met the Barkeep.

Now let's look at the timeline of the movie made using the Mobius strip

Let's look at what happened in the 2nd part of the Mobius strip Timeline, which starts after John met the Barkeep and joined with him to go back in time.

In this bar scene, the Barkeep tells his phrase to the john “What if I could put him in front of you, the man that ruined your life. If I could guarantee that you would get away with it, would you kill him?” this is the proposal of the Barkeep to the John and eventually, he accepted it and here we go,

01. Barkeep and John went back in time to find guy Jane met in the after school she eventually fell in love with - 

02. Then John fell in love with his past who is Jane - John resist to come back after falling in love with his past

03. He had to leave her because Barkeep asked John to come with him - 

04. John comes to the HQ and assigned as a new agent - Barkeep went on to retire from the agent post and went back in time to the New York days before the bomb blast.

05. John went after the Fizzler bomber - But got himself because the bomb went off during the process of defusing.

06. He gets his face burned and then got a face transplant -  

07.  After getting a new look he was assigned to a new job - To work as a Barkeep and get John to believe in himself so that he can go back in time with him and do the same.


The above scenes belong to the right side of the Mobius strip. You can see in the Mobius strip it looks like there's a common part in the middle but there isn't, the same thing happens in the movie where Jane and John met each other and but both of them are the same person with 2 different timeline positions, this can't be happening, it's too dangerous. It's like the Mobius strip even though they look like they are intersecting each other it isn't and neither its possibility.

Why couldn't 2 persons do this job instead of one person?

After seeing and looking at all of these things Why is it a loop and why does it need to be the same person interacting with himself in a different timeline? The agency can find another person to go and John stuffs right?

The very best reason I can think about this situation is that since this is already an impossible system in the subject of time travel, they wanted to make this whole loop system and ecosystem such that it won't affect other people in their timeline and if some anomaly to be happened it going to only affect Jane, John or Barkeep who are the same person.

Now it's a self-sustaining ecosystem created in the movie.

“I’ve changed so much, I doubt my own mother would recognize me.”,This quote was taken when John looks at himself from the mirror after he goes through the face transplant and its very ironic in a way because his own mother is also himself.

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