In Time/Fridge

Fridge Logic

• The system has been in place for well over 100 years, one would think that in that time someone would have figured out how to hack the system, counterfeit time, or surgically remove the mechanism which kills you when your time hits 0.
  • Who says they haven't? The Timekeepers are there for a reason. Stopping counterfeiting is likely one of their tasks, just like the Real Life US Secret Service.
  • While modern money can be traced to various origins and banks, we never see any system in place to detect stolen or counterfeit time. Once it's stolen, tough luck.
  • Also: Why was this system even implanted in the underclasses if the wealthy wanted immortality to themselves? Why not just put a huge price on the technology?
    • Because the illusion that everyone has a shot at immortality is what keeps the people in line. This was stated outright.
  • A bunch of the movie's plot holes involves the time zone borders which the character need to pass to get from one zone to another.
    • The Time Keeper could have phoned the Border and tell them to deny passage to Will's car after he's taken Sylvia hostage.
    • Even after Will and Sylvia have reached Dayton, the Time Keeper fail to know where they are, and only find out when Will phone them. This is ridiculous, after it is established that they can track the movement of "time" when they notice Will moving from Dayton to New Greenwich. This is also what made it possible for Will and Sylvia to travel back to New Greenwich and kidnap Weis. Apparently the surveillance technology used to track the movement of time is some sort of forgotten superpower.
    • The border's security is extremely inadequate. The toll booth appears to be made out of cardboard, and there seem to be no armed guards.
    • The Time Banks also have very poor security, which makes one wonder why no one thought of robbing them before Will and Sylvia did.
    • There are those little gray boxes you can upload time to - you would think that everyone would have one in secure storage and only leave the house with enough to last them a day or so to at least deter theft.
      • The poor may not have access to storage secure enough to make it worth it. Also, the devices themselves may be expensive, explaining why only the rich, businesses, government, and criminal organizations use them regularly. And of course, you saw how well not keeping much time on you worked out for Raymond.
• Obviously people have to depend on someone taking care of them, until they reach age 25, cuz until then their 1 Year time is frozen and no one can take their time or give them time (I think). Children can't buy anything.
  • At the start of the film there's a brief moment when a little girl asks Will for a couple of minutes which he transfers to a small metal object (probably a capsule). Apparently children can spend small amounts of time using a capsule. But still, you wonder what would happen to orphans.
  • It's not stated that they can't work for time through capsules. There are two major reasons they may have designed the system to start at age 25: to prevent the farming of children for time, or to allow people in the ghettoes to procreate at least once and contribute to the workforce a bit before dying.

Fridge Horror

• In Time revolves around a society in which people stop aging at 25. We see rich people who are very, very old, and Weis is 90 years old. He has a daughter who is only 27. Unless his wife is far younger than him (impossible to tell in this world) his wife had Sylvia at a very old age, so women probably have children when they're older. Where's the horror? The reason that older women are at a greater risk for Down syndrome is because a woman's eggs are exposed to wear and tear, plus a greater risk of being exposed to mutagens in the environment, which puts them at a greater risk for nondisjunction during later stages of meiosis. The Applied Phlebotinum that keeps everyone young might prevent the damage from typical wear-and-tear, but what about mutagens? We don't see anyone with disabilities in this world, and so I get two impressions from this: Either all babies (or at least all rich babies) are born from artificial means, which means there is probably a lot of eugenics (in the form of only selecting the very fit egg and sperm) going on (well, the world is pretty much filled with The Beautiful Elite) or, even worse, all babies with genetic or chromosomal disorders (or birth injuries) are either aborted, abandoned, segregated, or even killed at birth.
  • Since aging (post-maturity) happens due to gradual genetic damage as cells replicate, any method to stop aging would have to do so by preventing the damage from occurring. It's plausible that any such technique would also prevent damage due to mutagens; some sort of permanent "this is what your DNA is supposed to be" marker. It's difficult to say, of course, since the movie explains virtually nothing about how its premise works.
• Time is made by each person getting a year when they turn 25, so each year is worth one human life. Hamilton had a capsule containing a million years. How did he get all of that time?
  • Maybe the government issues time as welfare or as salary for government employees? Since people "spend" 24 hours per day, at least 24 hours per day per person have to be added through such means, unless the average lifespan is around 26. Hey, more Fridge Horror...
    • Sounds about right. Will wasn't doing that much better than that, and he had some business sense.
  • We know exactly how he got it: usury. Sure, he may have made some of it off of legitimate investments and financing the construction of factories and such, but most likely the better part of his fortune was made off of making short-term, high interest loans to the poor.
• With only getting an additional year at the age of 25, and how hard it is to get time, when you have a baby, the chances are slim to none that you will live to see that child become an adult.
• The pawn shop employees were REALLY compassionate souls. If they would have waited another minute, they would could have simply kept the earrings for themselves without having to pay anyone anything.
  • There may be a close watch on piles of dead bodies outside of pawn shops. Either from authorities or the free market: such shops probably make a large portion of their living from people in the exact same situation, so a shop probably wouldn't want to get a reputation for not actually doing business with the desperate.
• There probably does not exist anyone capable of maintaining the system. If there was, it would risk someone using this knowledge to produce counterfeit time, which would be identical in every way to real time. If only a single child-sized capsule were cracked to send time without subtracting its own, passed around in secret, it would destroy the entire economy. Therefore if anything breaks, it has to be thrown away. How long before all their systems fall apart?
  • If a person is born with a mutation that glitches their time reading, any glitch at all, either it kills them, or the timekeepers have to permanently incarcerate or kill them to preserve society.
• Isn't it likely that incest would be rampant among a class of wealthy, eternally youthful immortals?
• What's to be done? That is, even if someone benevolent, wise and disinterested came to be in charge, how could they possibly make the system just? I see 4 possibilities given what we know they can do, besides the system they already have, which many obviously don't like. (1) Go back to the way it was, let everyone age like they do now. That essentially means denying care for sickness and weakness when it is available and doable. Basically like denying a cure for cancer if we had one. An unethical decision to say the least. (2) Remove the timers and let everyone be immortal. The movie points out why that's a problem; where would you put everyone? Alternatively, assuming everyone still needs food, they'd run out of it sooner or later and many people would die of starvation, which is arguably more cruel than dying of expired time. (3) Let everyone be immortal, but prevent anyone (legally or genetically) from having any more children. Oppressive, and would result in stagnation of culture, innovation, and happiness. (4) The most just system I can think of is to ration the same exactly amount of time to everyone, say 100 years, outlaw/disable time transfer, and go back to normal money for commerce. This means everyone gets to look and be as healthy as a 25-year-old for 76 years, but then you die. Arguably better than what they have or what we have, but it also means perfectly healthy people have to die for a fairly arbitrary reason. And more WMG-ily, (5) Let everyone be immortal, let them have children, but colonize other planets. Maybe they have the technology to do that by then. But it would only last for so long. It's a paradox. The technology to cure aging seems to be something that we are ethically bound to do if we can, but it leads to the world being a horrible place to live, and to the inevitability of inethical decisions one way or another.
  • The problem with the time/money system as shown in the film is that it is implicitly not capitalism, but a centrally planned economy - there should be myriad sources of goods and services and just as many sources of income, so the oligarchs can't just arbitrarily increase the cost of living or decrease incomes. Supply and demand means that there should be places to get cheaper (if perhaps lower-quality) goods and services, and better-paying (if perhaps more hazardous) jobs. When the guy at the kiosk says "You want coffee or you want to reminisce?", customers should be able to tell him to fuck off. But there is no other place to get coffee, and that means that's not a store, that's a bread line. When Will says that his units are up and the pay desk says "So's the quota", there should be somewhere else for him to work. There is no other place, so it's a collective farm. In Time is not Reagan America, it's Soviet Russia.
  • The "quota" line especially reminded me of production quotas in command economies. Of course, you could also say it's a continent-spanning company town, which amounts to the same thing.