‘Father Time!’ is…quite the odd segment to talk about. I still had fun with it, and on a comedy level, it’s one of the better ones so far. But as for the story, when you actually think about it for a minute, it basically falls apart.
In this segment, Timmy wishes for laser vision to make clean-up easier at Cosmo’s suggestion. This leads to his dad’s trophy getting melted, and feeling bad about how angry he made him, Timmy wishes to go back in time and stop his dad from ever winning the trophy in the first place. That’s the basic set-up, but the segment packs in a lot in just 11 minutes.
Before I really dissect the plot, I want to briefly touch on the comedy aspect, because it’s easily the best thing about it. This is the segment that birthed the “This is where my X would be IF I HAD ONE!” meme, and that moment is just as great as I remembered. There’s also hippie Cosmo and Wanda, Bill Gates calling the Internet “Timmy” and having that come back up at the end, and the scary story involving nothing to watch on TV in the future. These are just a handful of the jokes here, and all of them land for me.
My personal favorite of them all, though, is the censoring of Timmy’s mom and dad’s real names. Obviously, the joke is that we’re never going to hear their real names, but as a kid, I always took it to mean that their actual names were so gross and horrible that they couldn’t be said on TV. I just wanted to bring that up so you can imagine Timmy’s dad being named after a slur or something, lol.
However, while the comedy is strong, the actual story is…a bit of a mess. Obviously, even the best time travel stories can’t get the concept exactly right, so you do have to take some liberties with it to make your plot work. Even the legendary “Back to the Future” couldn’t get it 100%. That being said, there are details about how time travel works here that raise more questions than I would like.
When it comes to the characters meeting past or future versions of themselves, this universe establishes that paradoxes just wouldn’t happen, which I’m perfectly fine with. The interactions between Cosmo and Wanda and their hippie counterparts are worth that. But once Timmy’s dad in the past loses the race, it results in a timeline where Timmy doesn’t exist and thus doesn’t have his fairies. Cosmo and Wanda disappear as a result of this, yet Timmy doesn’t. It‘s a small thing, but it makes the latter half of the segment that much more confusing. When you have that kind of blatant contradiction in place, that’s when my immersion breaks and I have to question things.
But even putting the time travel stuff aside, let’s just acknowledge the fact that not only does dictator school exist in this world, but kids are apparently sent there after getting last place in a race. Timmy’s dad was literally just one bad day from becoming maniacal ruler of the world(insert “Killing Joke” joke here). Don’t get me wrong, it’s hilarious that Timmy‘s dad was able to do this through the sheer power of emotional denial, but it’s…super bizarre that a dictator school for children exists at all.
Like I said, this is a bit of a weird one. You’ll have some laughs for sure, but I just wouldn’t suggest thinking about the story too much, as it will only hurt your head. Still, at least it was worth it to have Timmy be called “Internet” in this new timeline.
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