Why We're Drawn To Time Loop Stories Like 'Groundhog Day'

​There's a scene in "Groundhog Day" where, were it a bad movie, the story would reach its peak. Weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray), having lived through enough loops of the same titular day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, has gathered enough intel on Rita Hanson (Andie MacDowell) to get her back to his room at the bed & breakfast after a date. Phil is incredibly close to "getting the girl" — perhaps this will set him free from the endless loop of February 2nds? Then, he slips up. Rita realizes, correctly, that she is being played by a skeezy manipulator. She slaps Phil. After that, we're treated to a montage of Phil trying the same thing over and over, ending in a righteous slap each time. If Phil is learning anything of value from these repeated attempts at wooing Rita, he's learning it very, very slowly.

This is, to my mind, the saddest scene in "Groundhog Day." Yes, sadder than the unchanging fate of the old homeless man, sadder than Phil's bleak string of suicides. Here's a man, using the godlike power granted to him by living in an eternity of the same day to try to trick someone he (we should assume at this point) genuinely likes into bed. Phil has likely spent months perfecting his pick-up artist techniques on other women before moving on to Rita, and maybe the only reason his rotten persistence meets defeat here is because he actually likes Rita. Phil has utterly wasted all the potential of his time loop predicament up to this point. He isn't stuck in a hellish situation so much as he's made it one himself. That's got to be rock-bottom for the functionally immortal.

There's still hope for change, though.

The wealth of time loop stories out there testifies to the resonance of the idea. It's a great high concept hook: time loops raise big questions of choice and fate from the get-go and they pull philosophical complexity out of the most banal scenes. A time loop can turn repeating events into puzzles with infinite solutions, or into set-ups with numerous punchlines. The idea of a time loop is so irresistible that we'll probably keep seeing it crop up again and again in pop culture with new twists for as long as we live.¹

So which stories involving time loops do interesting things, and which just give us the same old ideas again? In this installment of Fan Service, we'll look at the history of the time loop trope and examine the best stories that use it.

Again And Again And Again…

What follows is by no means an exhaustive list of stories involving time loops, and it would be missing a lot of the entries on it without the tidy list at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Steve Carper's well-researched article on the idea's usage before "Groundhog Day." I've ordered it by the year they were released: note just how many time loop stories came out in 2017 alone. All the items listed in bold are either entertaining enough or short enough to be worth your time, and an asterisk denotes that the story isn't quite a time loop story:

• 1892 — "Christmas Every Day" by William Dean Howells*, adapted for film in 1996
• 1904 — "The Defence of Duffer's Drift" by Ernest Dunlop Swinton*
• 1941 — "Doubled and Redoubled" by Malcolm Jameson
• 1950 — "Friday, the Nineteenth" by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
• 1973 — "12:01 PM" by Richard A. Lupoff
• 1981 — "One Fine Day" by Leon Arden
• 1990 — "12:01 PM," short film adaptation directed by Jonathan Heap
• 1992 — "Cause and Effect," episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation"
• 1993 — "Groundhog Day," story by Danny Rubin and directed by Harold Ramis
• 1993 — "12:01," TV movie adaptation directed by Jack Sholder
• 1998 — "Run, Lola, Run" directed by Tom Tykwer*
• 1998 — "Same Time Last Week," episode of "The Angry Beavers"
• 1999 — "Deja vu All Over Again," episode of "Charmed"
• 1999 — "Monday," episode of "The X-Files"
• 2000 — "Window of Opportunity," episode of "Stargate SG-1"
• 2004 — "All You Need Is Kill" by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
• 2006 — "Day Break," ABC television drama
• 2010 — "Before I Fall" by Lauren Oliver, adapted for film in 2017
• 2011 — "Source Code," directed by Duncan Jones*
• 2014 — "Edge of Tomorrow" a.k.a. "Live. Die. Repeat.," directed by Doug Liman
• 2016 — "ARQ," directed by Tony Elliott
• 2017 — "Hot Mess Time Machine," episode of "The Mindy Project"
• 2017 — "Happy Death Day," directed by Christopher B. Landon
• 2017 — "Naked," directed by Michael Tiddes, Netflix remake of "Naken" (2000)
• 2017 — "A Day," directed by Cho Sun-ho
• 2017 — "Magic To Make The Sanest Man Go Mad," episode of "Star Trek: Discovery"

The First Loop(s)

Neither "Christmas Every Day" or "The Defense of Duffer's Drift," written 12 years apart, are time loop stories per se. The former features a year of Christmases — the dates on the calendar advance normally, and things don't vanish or snap back in place at the day's end. "Duffer's Drift" does feature repeating events and "resets," but the loops are all successive instances of the same premonitory dream. It's worth noting that the elements these two tales share with time loop stories don't need time travel to have the intended dramatic effect.

"Christmas Every Day" is a short, whimsical tale by William Dean Howells, an American writer and once-editor of The Atlantic. It's a breezy read that lampshades (and pokes fun at) its own moral takeaway by establishing a story-within-a-story. The inner story, of a girl whose wish for a year of Christmases is granted by a fairy, quickly turns satirical. Everyone in the world is aware of the repeating holiday, and as there's no daily reset, by the end of the first week people start growing sick of Christmas. As time wears on large swathes of the population go poor from constantly buying presents and sweets. People are relieved by the fake gifts on the April Fools Day Christmas; Americans are enraged by a July 4th Christmas where all the "Fourth of July orations all turn into Christmas carols." It's the old "you can have too much of a good thing" argument, which repeatedly finds its expression in proper time loop stories through the manic, decadent binge periods of the trapped individuals.

Often what'll lift a trapped character out of their post-loop-binge depressive state is a concerted effort at learning something from the loops, which is the main focus of "The Defence of Duffer's Drift." Written by Ernest Dunlop Swinton, then a Captain in the British Army, the book is an off blend of fiction and applied military tactics. The main character, named Lieutenant Backsight Forethought — because who needs subtlety in a tactics manual — has a series of six dreams about an upcoming battle in the Second Boer War. In his first few dreams, the Lieutenant's company of men lose the battle disastrously. Each time, the Lieutenant analyzes their failure and adjusts for the next dream. By modern standards both the bits of tactical wisdom and the crude, racist observations that accompany them are woefully outdated, but the contribution to time loop stories endures: with finer knowledge of the events, the battle can effectively be "solved" for a best-case scenario.

We can't know if either Howells's Christmas fable or Swinton's slightly-fanciful tactics book went on to directly influence later time loop stories, but a few decades later the idea starts cropping up in science fiction magazines, and recognizable quirks start to accumulate. All credit to Steve Carper for dutifully calling out instances of these during tropes.² Malcolm Jameson's "Doubled and Redoubled" opens on an alarm clock; Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's "Friday, the Nineteenth" calls out the looping day in the title and follows an adulterous pair grown tired of their humdrum lives. The time loop as moral comeuppance, the ominous clocks: either great minds think alike or these elements were seeded for the stories to come.

Whose Idea Is It Anyway?

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction — which is still in existence today — published "Friday, the Nineteenth" in 1950. Twenty-three years later, the magazine published another time loop short story: Richard A. Lupoff's "12:01 PM," which might be the best known time loop story other than "Groundhog Day"… if only because Lupoff nearly sued Harold Ramis and company.

The main character of "12:01 PM," Myron Castleman, is stuck in an hourly loop. He's the only one aware of it, and the people around repeat the same set of actions every hour unless he intervenes. He tries to find a way out of the loop by contacting a physicist, but a sudden heart attack puts an end to things… only, of course, it doesn't. The loop starts again and Castleman is alive. Lupoff, content to finish on a "Twilight Zone"-esque twist, ends the story there. Castleman's immortality is suggested, but not explored further.

Perhaps it's for lack of another angle or arc in the story that "12:01 PM" lingered for a while as just a short story, or maybe the success of "Back to the Future" in '85 opened the door to more time travel projects in film. Either way, "12:01 PM" didn't get adapted for the screen until 1990.

In 1981, another author took the idea for a spin. In Leon Arden's novel "One Fine Day," the lead character is pulled into a time loop by way of witchcraft. To call the novel's plot "convoluted" would be an understatement (there's a voodoo love spell, the time loop results from a deal with the Devil, God has a direct conversation with the protagonist, and so on). Apart from the time loop, the novel doesn't share much with Lupoff's "12:01 PM." If there's a winner in the fight, it's probably Lupoff for having kept things simple. You could say this difference between Arden and Lupoff extends to what comes next.

Danny Rubin, the writer of "Groundhog Day," says he came up with the initial idea for the movie in the mid-'80s.³ Before he had the setting and title, he knew he wanted to explore the potential for time loop-aided mischief and seduction. In his first draft — which I assume was typed up on a computer, judging by the "groundhg.not" at the top of the first page — Rubin lays out the key points of how the "Groundhog Day" loop operates:

• He is stuck in a time warp. Every day at dawn he wakes up in his bed, and it is February 2nd.
• He will relive that day for eternity.
• He can behave differently each day, and the world will respond accordingly.
• He remembers everything from previous days. He doesn't wake up the same person, in that he will gain wisdom, or acquire extreme frustration, or become depressed, or have things to look forward to, or he will make plans.
• He can die, but will always wake again the next day. He will remember dying, but not death.

So Phil, Rubin's main character, can die over and over just like Myron Castleman in "12:01 PM." On top of that, early drafts of the script provided an explanation for the time loop: witchcraft, a la "One Fine Day." But Lupoff and Arden's stories are both obscure, right? It's entirely likely that Rubin had no idea about the existence of either.

What makes this slightly harder to believe is that Jonathan Heap's short-film adaptation of "12:01 PM," which aired on Showtime, managed to nab an Oscar nomination in 1990.

Yes, short films get short shrift at the Oscars, but if Rubin did encounter a time loop story prior to the filming of "Groundhog Day," it likely would've been this one. The short film even fudges the end of the story in a way that brings it closer to "Groundhog Day" — Castleman (played by Kurtwood Smith) dies by suicide, not a heart attack.

Adding insult to injury for Lupoff and company, "12:01 PM" was adapted as a feature length TV movie in 1993… and it aired five months after the release of "Groundhog Day." Two things here: first, it's totally inexcusable that "Groundhog Day" was actually released on February 12th, 1993 and not at least before Groundhog Day. Second, the TV movie version of Lupoff's story, simply titled "12:01," expands the time loop from an hour to a full day. If anything, that makes it closer to "Groundhog Day" than to the story it's based on. They didn't even get Kurtwood Smith to reprise his role!

While Lupoff and company cried foul but decided against a lawsuit, Leon Arden didn't. He sued Columbia Pictures, Danny Rubin, and Harold Ramis. He didn't win — the court opinions lay out clearly that the jury didn't find the two stories similar beyond the repeating day. One gets a hint from this section about pacing that the jurors found "One Fine Day" a little boring in comparison:

"Overall, One Fine Day is a slower-paced work than "Groundhog Day." The Novel features a great deal of introspection by Rob, including, for example, a fifteen-page flashback. In contrast, "Groundhog Day" is a relatively fast-paced movie, employing many quick repetitions of the day for comic effect, such as shots of Rita slapping Phil and of Phil's numerous suicide attempts.[7] Moreover, the repeating day in the Novel recurs only approximately 14 times, while the repeating day in the Film recurs many more times indeed, enough times for Phil to learn, for example, to play the piano and carve ice sculptures."

Whether or not Rubin and Ramis were unfamiliar with other time loop stories before making theirs, "Groundhog Day" advanced the established time loop tropes and contributed several of its own. Now the alarm clock plays an obnoxious song; a repeatable heist provides money for Phil's antics; acquisition of complex skills are compressed in montage. Most importantly, "Groundhog Day" showed that the time loop idea is totally compatible with a happy ending; that maybe something good can come from all the repetition.

It's Like 'Groundhog Day' But…

Of course, in the wake of "Groundhog Day," plenty of bad things have resulted from repetition. Does anyone really need "Pete's Christmas" (the lead is a teen, and it's Christmas)? Or "Premature" (again a teen, and it's the day he loses his virginity)? Or "Day Break" (the lead is Taye Diggs, and it's a whole TV show)?⁴

Post-1993, "Groundhog Day" is both the obvious cultural touchstone and the high bar for time loop stories. If you come at the king, you best not miss. If some similarity to "Groundhog Day" is a given at this point, then what sets apart the best time loop stories that came after it? Well:

"Monday" — "The X-Files"

Leave it to "The X-Files" to put an interesting spin on time loops. Co-written by Vince Gilligan and John Shiban, "Monday" puts Mulder and Scully in a time loop that always ends in a bombing at a bank — only they're not the ones aware of it. Pam, the girlfriend of the bank bomber, is aware that she's stuck in the loop. This both pulls the "X-Files" trick of putting Mulder in the skeptic seat for a change and sets up the episode's intense final confrontation, where a trusting Mulder tries to convince the bomber that his actions have trapped Pam in her own private hell.

"Source Code"

At first, Duncan Jones's "Source Code" feels like a post-9/11 thriller take on "Groundhog Day," with all the coldness that implies. Colter (Jake Gyllenhaal) has been drafted into the experimental "Source Code" program, which can send his consciousness back in time and into another person's body (so there's a little bit of "Quantum Leap" here too). Colter wakes up on a train and has 8 minutes in each loop to try and locate the terrorist responsible for blowing it up. The "Source Code" device only allows for mental time travel backwards: the train has already been destroyed, and Colter's only there to try and prevent a second attack.

Here come the spoilers: The real twist that elevates this time loop — and that keeps the movie from being ending on a sour note — is that each loop turns out to be its own timeline. On his last loop, Colter manages to prevent the bombing. When his 8 minutes are up, time proceeds normally. Now Colter's in a new timeline (though yes, he's taken over someone else's body) and that timeline's copy of him is ready to tackle the next disaster.

"Edge of Tomorrow"

Based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka's Japanese-language novel with an infinitely cooler name ("All You Need Is Kill"), Doug Liman's big-screen adaptation "Edge of Tomorrow" mashes up the familiar time loop beats of "Groundhog Day" with a heavy helping of "Aliens"-esque action. William Cage (Tom Cruise) is a cowardly military man forced into a losing battle against an invading alien force, and now he's living through the same battle over and over. It's not long before an ace-soldier, Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) discovers Cage's secret on one of the loops and reveals that she used to loop in time too.

Cruise and Blunt keep the long, looping war of attrition that ensues from being a boring CGI-smashfest. It's a shame they whitewashed the Cage character by casting Cruise, though the number of ways the film gleefully kills Cruise in the first act sort-of makes up for it (he's maimed, blown up, run over, smashed, shot…). The ultimate feat of "Edge of Tomorrow" is that it manages to explain why the time loop is occurring and incorporates the accompanying rules into the plot in a way that doesn't fall flat. "Groundhog Day" did right by leaving out an explanation; "Edge of Tomorrow" works better since it gives you one.

"Happy Death Day"

Like "Edge of Tomorrow" turned the puzzle potential of time loops towards a blockbuster-scale alien invasion, "Happy Death Day" presents a slasher film where the victim has the chance to solve their own murder. Sure, it's an unabashed "Groundhog Day" copycat (there's a musical alarm clock and they call out the film by name), but the solve-your-own-murder angle is so rich it's amazing this wasn't made sooner.

Loop, There It Is

I'm happy to celebrate the stories that have imitated "Groundhog Day" because, whether or not it was the first to do the time loop idea, the film did everything it could to make that idea work, and the shows and films that learned from it carry some of that spark. It cleverly makes the most of infinite time in a limited space — "Groundhog Day" feels like it's got several movies' worth of ideas in the space of one. It's a rare gem.

The idea of a time loop is so irresistible that we'll probably keep seeing it crop up again and again in pop culture with new twists for as long as we–5