Time Cut's timeline and time travel, explained

Netflix’s ‘Time Cut’ tells the story of a girl who travels back in time to save her sister from being murdered by a serial killer. The main character is a girl named Lucy who feels suffocated by her parents, who are still grieving for their first daughter, who was murdered twenty years ago. The killer is never caught and the parents are so concerned about Lucy’s safety that they refuse to let her live her life as she wishes. One day, by a stroke of luck, Lucy stumbles upon a time machine and ends up twenty years in the past, while her sister is still alive. The next series of events permanently changes everything about Lucy’s life and the people around her. SPOILERS AHEAD

The laws of time travel in time saving

Where time travel is possible, there must be a time machine, and Lucy finds one in the shed where her sister was murdered. She later discovers that the machine was created by a serial killer who wanted to commit the perfect crime. Instead of killing people at the same time, he waited for the future, created the time machine, and then traveled to the past to kill the people he hated. The time machine was created using the technology of SONR, the local spacetime research organization, which contained rubidium used to power the time machine, which would cause an explosion due to the collision of matter and antimatter. The quantum entanglement of the two would create a wormhole through which a person could travel back and forth in time.

The killer planned to use the time machine, and once the job was done, he would go back to the future so no one could catch him again. This worked the first time, but then Lucy ended up in the past and everything changed. When Lucy finds herself in the past, her first concern is finding a way back home. Her second concern is to prevent the murders from happening, but she is told that tinkering with the past can lead to the creation of paradoxes, which can completely rewrite things. For starters, if Lucy saves her sister Summer, it would stop her parents from trying for another child, meaning Lucy would never be born, which creates a whole other cycle of its own. Despite the warning, Lucy tries to stop the first two of the four murders, but the attempt ends with the death of one more person, which did not happen in the original timeline.

It is now clear to Lucy that every second she spends in the past could have dire consequences for the future, but that does not solve her moral dilemma. Ultimately, she decides to save the people, not caring if doing so would wipe her out of existence. However, she later discovers that time travel works a little differently than she expected. By changing the past she creates a future where her parents will never have her, but that doesn’t erase her from existence. The Lucy from the original timeline still exists, just as the serial killer would continue to exist even if his past self committed suicide. It would remain a paradox, sticking out like a sore thumb in the fabric of the space-time continuum, belonging neither to the past nor to the future.

The chronology of events in the original timeline

Towards the end of ‘Time Cut’, two timelines are formed resulting in very different futures for the people involved. This is what happens in the original timeline. On April 16, 2003, the serial killer kills two teenagers in a shopping center. The next day he kills Emmy, and on April 18, Lucy’s sister Summer is murdered. The reason the killer, who turns out to be Quinn, dates back to April 16 is because this is the date he was utterly humiliated when his classmates threw him into the river, even though they knew he couldn’t swim. As Quinn tried to save himself, everyone in the crowd laughed, while no one came to his aid.

As if this wasn’t humiliating enough, Quinn confessed his love for Summer on the night of April 18 at the Spring Festival, but she told him she could never love him the same way. Quinn took this rejection to heart, unaware that Summer was referring to her homosexuality. Anyway, even if she was straight, it didn’t give Quinn permission to kill her just because she rejected him. Anyway, Quinn didn’t kill all those people right away. As he seethed with shame and fear, things got worse and worse for him. As the years passed, Quinn worked on a time machine, focusing mainly on getting revenge on the people who made him feel small all those years ago. He discovered he needed rubidium to power his machine, so he broke into SONR, killed a guard, stole the rubidium, fired his time machine and went back to April 16, 2003 to start the killings.

Summer is murdered on April 18, 2003, leaving her parents heartbroken. Because they were happy with the child they had, they had never thought about having another child. But when Summer was killed, they had to reconsider their decision. After several rounds of IVF, they finally had Lucy. The loss of Summer made them overly protective of Lucy, forcing her to forever live in the shadow of the deceased sister she never knew. On the twentieth anniversary of Summer’s death, Lucy visits the memorial, but this is also the day Future Quinn decides to go back in time, completely unaware that Lucy has followed him.

The rewritten series of events in the new timeline

Lucy was never supposed to follow Future Quinn until 2003, but she did, and that changed everything. Since Lucy knows about all the deaths, she can also think of ways to save the victims, which completely changes the timeline. Due to her intervention, the third victim is a security guard who dies trying to stop the killer. This is the first major change in the timeline. The second change comes when Lucy, Quinn and Summer save Emmy from death. This brings a huge change in Summer’s life, as almost losing the girl she loves causes her to come out, something she had put on hold, causing a rift between her and Emmy.

The second big change is when Lucy saves Summer. Knowing exactly where the killer will find Summer, a plan is hatched to trap and kill the serial killer and prevent any more murders from happening. There is a small problem, but the plan still works. Lucy uses the machine to return her and the killer to the 2024 timeline, where she kills him, ending the cycle of death once and for all. But after saving her sister, she’s made some serious changes in her own life. Now that Summer is alive, her parents don’t have to think about another child, so they never go through the IVF rounds, and Lucy is never born in this new timeline. Yet the original Lucy remains, the memory of the paradox she herself created.

When Lucy realizes that her parents are no longer her parents, she feels completely tied down in the 2024 timeline. But just because the future has forgotten her doesn’t mean she’s erased from the past, where she first felt like she belonged. So she decides to go back to the 2003 timeline. Here, things have changed radically. Summer is now with Emmy, holding the promise of the long and fulfilling life she was originally meant to have. Lucy goes to live with her and can be with the loving parents she deserved in her original timeline. She applies for a NASA internship and gets it in 2003, securing her future.

The most significant change in this timeline happens to Quinn. Lucy’s arrival saves him from being thrown into the river and humiliated in front of the entire school. Because she and Lucy are outcasts, they bond, giving Quinn a sense of camaraderie he never found in his original timeline. Seeing himself turn into a killer opens Quinn’s eyes, and he promises himself that he will never become the kind of person who kills someone just because he is rejected. This means that he will never become a serial killer, which means that no new time-traveling serial killers will come knocking in 2003 Sweetly.