Steins;Gate stands out as one of the best time-travel stories of all time. These sorts of sci-fi movies and shows often need a bit of grace, since time travel, by nature, doesn’t make perfect sense. Even the most beloved stories, like Back to the Future, are packed full of plot holes and paradoxes. However, Steins;Gate handled time travel as well as it possibly could have.
Steins; Gate is a 24-episode anime series originally released in 2011. It’s a rare addition to the genre, with a 100% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 95% audience score. Across the board, viewers praise Steins;Gate for its creativity. Sci-fi anime is known to push boundaries, but none are quite as ambitious. This has everything to do with Steins;Gate‘s complex and unique time-travel model, which fills in the gaps in more traditional sci-fi stories.
What Is Steins;Gate About?
Steins;Gate follows Rintaro Okabe, an 18-year-old with a fascination with and proclivity for advanced science. Through a chaotic series of events, including the discovery of the dead body of neuroscientist Kurisu Makise, Okabe and his friends learn that an in-development, high-tech microwave allows text messages to be sent back in time. This ultimately led them to develop a system for sending “D-mails” to the past in order to change the present and future.
The more Okabe and his friends tweak this time-travel system, the more they achieve. Soon, the characters themselves can travel through time. However, efforts to change inevitable tragedies depend on creating different ones, forcing the characters into difficult choices. Steins;Gate is intense, mind-bending, romantic, andemotional, featuring a group of spectacularly developed characters.
Steins;Gate Avoids All The Usual Time Travel Plot Holes
Time travel projects typically fall into a few categories, each with its own pitfalls. Paradoxical stories see characters go back in time only to find that they can’t change the past, since anything they do has already happened. There are changeable-future timelines as well, in which the characters return to their own time and find that everything they did in the past has impacted the present. Sci-fi is also full of alternate-reality time-travel models that establish a branched timeline or an extensive multiverse.
None of these models is perfect, but Steins;Gate manages to carefully bring them all together in a way that doesn’t contradict itself while also addressing their pitfalls. D-mails and other forms of traveling create new branches in the timeline, but these branches naturally converge through “attractor fields.” This ensures that key events are unchangeable, while other aspects of the story can be shifted.
Of course, it’s impossible for a time-travel sci-fi story to avoid plotholes entirely. If it all made perfect sense, then time travel would be a real-world concept. Still, Steins;Gate does the best job of sealing up the sorts of issues seen in other stories like Back to the Future or even the MCU.
You Can’t Watch Steins;Gate Just Once
Perhaps the best thing about Steins;Gate is its rewatchability. Once you have all the context of this show’s 24 episodes, you simply have to go back to pick up all those things you didn’t notice the first time. There’s something new to discover with every binge. Thankfully, as one of the best sci-fi anime of all time, Steins;Gate is available to stream on Crunchyroll and Prime Video. Just be warned, it might ruin other time travel stories for you forever.
- Release Date
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2011 – 2015-00-00
- Network
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Sun TV, Teletama
- Directors
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Kazuhiro Ozawa, Kanji Wakabayashi, Tomoki Kobayashi, Koji Kobayashi, Tomoko Hiramuki, Hisato Shimoda, Shigetaka Ikeda, Hiroyuki Tsuchiya, Yuzuru Tachikawa
- Writers
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Toshizo Nemoto
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Asami Imai
Kurisu Makise (voice)
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Mamoru Miyano
Rintaro Okabe (voice)
