Groundhog Day (1993) is the first movie I’ve watched in roughly four months (the last one was Original Cast Album: Company). It’s one of those classics that’s wormed its way into our collective consciousness, classic enough that I feel a twinge of shame for not having watched it yet. (Much like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Terminator and Avatar, none of which I have watched.)

I knew the basic premise, by osmosis. The time loop. Groundhog Day did to time loops what Back to the Future did to time travel. There were two questions which I did not know how the movie would answer:

(1)   How do you break out of a time loop?

(2)   Why is there a time loop in the first place?

As for question (1), the protagonist, narcissistic weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) breaks out of the time loop by becoming a better person. There is no physics justification for this, but it satisfies the needs of the narrative.

Question (2) is never addressed. Why is there a time loop, and why of all people does it happen to Phil? The movie makes no attempt to justify this—it merely presents the time loop as a fait accompli. After I finished the movie I immersed myself in a lot of discussion and fan theory about it. Some said it happened to Phil because at the beginning he’s an egocentric jerk, and that’s why he could only escape after becoming the best version of himself. But that’s a narrative justification, not a physical one. The director said he considered a few in-universe justifications (mad scientist? jilted ex-lover curse?) but ultimately decided to keep it unanswered.

I kind of like it that way.

Now that I think about it, I’m quite fond of fantastical plot elements that the story makes absolutely no effort to justify. Dream logic. In Yesterday (2019), there’s a brief power outage and the whole world has forgotten the existence of the Beatles. The movie doesn’t dwell on why a blackout might cause (or be caused by, or otherwise linked to) the global memory wipe of the beloved British rock band, because that’s not important to the story it wants to tell. The premise received some flak from the critics, charges of weakness for giving no explanation, but it seems to me that giving no explanation was the right thing to do.

And sometimes a story attempts to justify a fantastical plot element and it ends up falling flat. I borrowed The Three-Body Problem (2006) from a friend in late 2021, and I remember feeling thrilled when the character Wang Miao began experiencing strange hallucinations, like a countdown to the end of the world appearing on photographs he took. It felt as unsettling as any of the finer SCP Foundation entries. But perhaps if you’re writing not horror but science fiction, as Cixin Liu was, you feel a compulsion to explain away the horror with scientific-sounding justifications. And so Liu gave us the sophon, the super-intelligent extremely-high-dimensional computer wrapped in a single subatomic particle, which deliberately played tricks on the high-profile Chinese scientists to hinder their progress. This feels like too overpowered an explanation, likely to introduce a whole lot of plot holes, but how else do you explain the hallucinations scientifically?

On another note, I found the concept of The Maze Runner (2009) strikingly visceral. Imagine: a whole society of teenage boys trapped in the centre of an ever-shifting maze. The trappings of social hierarchy form as they conduct expeditions deeper and deeper into the maze to find a way out. I loved the idea of that. But once they got out, what then? It feels like James Dashner dreamed up this awesome concept but then felt like he had to justify it in order to be taken seriously—why on earth would you have a situation where a bunch of teenagers are trapped in a giant maze?—and the rest followed predictably. Well, there’s this dystopia, and the teenagers are actively being watched by Powerful People Outside in order to assess their characters, and the Maze is all an experiment. Once that justification was settled on, it kind of blended in with all the other teenage dystopian fare that defined early 2010s YA literature.

This is by no means a universal pattern for me, though! I liked Groundhog Day and Yesterday because they deliberately gave no explanation for their fantastical plot elements, but I also liked The Martian because it explained everything about itself—every plot device was justified by science and character and logistics, an ecstasy of internal and external consistency.

I’m having a hard time explaining why I dislike plot device justifications in one case and like them in another. I wonder if I even need a framework to justify these kinds of opinions.