Dragon Ball isn’t exactly known for its consistent storyline. The series has plenty of plot holes and discrepancies, but its main draw has always been its intense action and likable characters anyway. That being the case, a dropped plot thread here or there has never been something that was make-or-break for the franchise. Still, that doesn’t mean it does everything wrong. In fact, Dragon Ball Z happened to pull off one of the most complicated concepts in science fiction: time travel.
Partially due to the nature of the series itself, and partly due to the way time travel was approached in the story, DBZ not only made time travel work but it made it into one of its best and most popular arcs in the entire franchise. Future Trunks is a fan-favorite DBZ character and a staple of the series, and he is ultimately central to the time travel aspect of the Cell and Android Sagas. It isn’t perfect, and there are plenty of complicated issues that arise from it, but none of the normal problems of time travel that sci-fi often succumbs to in popular media seem to have the same effect on Goku and his friends.
How DBZ Made Time Travel Work Where Other Series Failed
Some sci-fi concepts are more difficult than others for an author to pull off due to the level of suspension of judgment required to make them work. Time travel is just one of those things that becomes more far-fetched the more people think about it, and the well-known paradoxes inherent in time travel narratives often make them too convoluted for audiences to take seriously. That’s why, making fans have to think about it less is usually the best way for a story to pull time travel off. While time travel can potentially be done in a more complex manner, it has to be extremely well-thought-out to do so. In other words, there’s really no happy medium when it comes to making time travel work for a story: it’s either one extreme or the other.
One of the reasons time travel worked in Dragon Ball Z was because Akira Toriyama took the route of keeping things simple and not focusing too much on the mechanics of time travel itself. Instead, DBZ uses time travel to focus instead on the consequences and implications that it has on the characters. This led to the introduction of some of the most popular characters in the series like Future Trunks, Androids 17 & 18, and Cell, as well as some of the best fight sequences in the show.
Even with the time travel concept itself, one thing that Toriyama did well which prevented a lot of issues was in not allowing Trunks to travel back to his own version of the past. Because he travels back to a past that automatically creates a new timeline, it avoids the “grandfather paradox”: a paradox that questions the validity of time travel on the basis that one could theoretically return to the past and kill their own grandfather before their father was born. In this sense, time travel in DBZ is almost more like the ability to travel to a parallel universe than it is a movement back and forth through a linear timeline.
Another reason time travel worked in DBZ was that it never seemed out of place in the Dragon Ball universe. Dragon Ball was always set in a sci-fi setting that seemed to present a not-so-distant future scenario. This made things feel believable while also giving room to present futuristic technology in a way that didn’t seem out of place in its world. The result was that, when Future Trunks’ time machine was revealed, it already looked like something that Bulma could have feasibly come up with — even implementing the capsule-based technology of Capsule Corp for good measure. This made things rooted in science from the get-go, and didn’t require characters to use ridiculous time-warping abilities that could have unnecessarily complicated things.
Dragon Ball Z Made Time Travel Seem Simple When it Really Wasn’t
One of the saving graces for DBZ‘s time travel scenario was the fact that it wasn’t over-utilized during the Android and Cell Sagas. It was an ever-present aspect of the story, but the actual traveling through time was only shown to occur less than a handful of times. This helped prevent the problem of too many parallel timelines. The actual aspect of time travel therefore never had to be the focus on the character’s minds, and all the attention was instead directed on the most important part of Dragon Ball: the action.
As simple as DBZ made things appear though, there is a complicated under-belly to its time travel element. There are at least three timelines total which are shown to occur during the Android and Cell Sagas. First of these timelines is the one that Future Trunks left behind in order to warn Goku. Next, there is the main timeline that the series takes place within up until Trunks’ first arrival. Finally, there is Cell’s time period in which he kills Future Trunks to steal his time machine to return to the past, eventually starting the Cell Games against the heroes. Things get more complicated when considering that there is likely the existence of an additional fourth timeline. This fourth timeline would be the one that the Future Trunks from Cell’s timeline returned from initially, and it ultimately is considered to be the “ideal timeline” where everything went right because the androids were shut down using the remote Bulma created.
Given how complex and uncertain some of these concepts are, the fact that these additional timelines go largely unnoticed by the majority of fans is a testimony to how well DBZ pulled the time travel concept off. Most of the problems that lead to things like a fourth timeline are things that the average fan will never even consider, and that’s a sign that a piece of fiction has done its job. In any work of fictional media, especially sci-fi, there are bound to be plenty of inconsistencies, paradoxes and the like, but the less glaringly obvious they are, the more engrossed viewers can feel in that story; and that’s certainly the case with DBZ.
Dragon Ball Super Showed Why Time Travel is So Easy to Get Wrong
Whereas DBZ was able to keep things simple enough to make time travel work with minimal issues, Dragon Ball Super once again reminded fans why most series are better off staying far away from the idea. As Dragon Ball Super‘s Goku Black Arc shows, once time travel starts to get overcomplicated with too many rules, things can fall apart quickly.
Things already got complicated enough as simple as the Cell Games were, so it was bound to get even worse when Future Trunks traveled back in time again during the Goku Black arc of Dragon Ball Super. Time travel worked in DBZ because it was not really a focal point on the mind of the characters, but by Super, the concepts of multiple timelines, multiverses, and Time Rings were brought to the forefront, and they just demonstrated how over-the-top time travel can become in a story. Future Trunks was such a beloved character in DBZ that it was likely an easy decision to bring him back in Dragon Ball Super, even considering how ridiculous the time travel elements of the Goku Black arc became. Unfortunately, things would have been much simpler had he stayed in his own time period where he belonged. Fans will just have to travel back to the series’ past in Dragon Ball Z if they want to see time travel done right.
