Long-distance love stories: 12 TV shows and movies where romance transcends space and time
Star Trek: Discovery, Outlander, Terminator, and more sci-fi TV shows and movies that put the distance in “long-distance relationship”
TV Features Paul Stamets
The Lake House (Screenshot); Source Code (Screenshot); Outlander (Photo: Starz); Terminator 2 (Screenshot); Star Trek: Discovery (Photo: Jan Thijs/CBS) Graphic: Rebecca Fassola
In honor of The A.V. Club’s Love Week, enjoy this look at extremely long-distance romances from 2021.
As technology continues to advance, physical proximity to our jobs and loved ones becomes more of a perk than a necessity. Still, keeping a relationship going strong isn’t easy over Zoom. A 2010 German study found that the average length of a long-distance relationship was 2.9 years, while “proximal” relationships lasted 7.3 years. But if you aren’t able be with your Valentine this February, don’t give up hope on your lasting love. We only need look to our pop culture role models for proof that not only can Jim and Pam make it through Pam’s summer studying graphic design in New York, couples can survive being separated by lightyears, actual years, and even death. Here are a dozen examples of TV and film love stories that took the meaning of long-distance relationship to the extreme.
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Torchwood “Captain Jack Harness”
I guess the Doctor and Rose, and later River Song, would fit here too.
More so River Song, since they keep meeting out of order. My next binge of Doctor Who will be to watch the River Song episodes in her chronological order, not the Doctor’s.
For all the talk about how unlinear their romance was, it was surprisingly straightforward. From her first appearance with Tennant, it was implied she had experiences with several regenerations of the Doctor. To find out most of the romance was just with Smith’s version (she was completely unaware of Capaldi’s version, which means she wasn’t aware of any of the later ones, and pre Tennant Doctors can’t have really known her) was pretty disappointing.
I mean Discovery did Bury Their Gay (Relationships) pretty quickly in S1 for “shock” and The Terminator in retrospect has always struck me as weird in how “true lovey” it tries to be when it’s a guy who is effectively brainwashed into creepily obsessing over a woman so he’d definitely volunteer to go back in time to shag her.
I’ve always seen Kyle Reese as terribly emotionally stunted. The dialogue reveals he doesn’t have a love partner back where he came from. And let’s face it, an Apocalyptic War probably isn’t conducive to things like dating and romance. He’s basically a 13 year old with his first crush.
I mean, they didn’t really bury their gay relationship since it continues to be a key part of the show to this day.
An argument could be made that they Buried Their Gays, realized they were facing a backlash for doing so, and thus brought Culber back to life though mushroom magic in the next season.
They fridged Culber, though. I’m really glad they brought him back and his and Stamets’ relationship is one of my favorite parts of the show, but they killed him for shock value.
Yeah, I don’t feel like they buried the gay relationship since they made it front and center and then only really paused it for a bit with multiverse shenanigans.
Quantum Leap did it a few times, perhaps most effectively when Sam jumped into some rando and told Al’s wife that he was still alive and in Vietnam and would be coming home.
Sam didn’t jump into anyone that time, he leaped as himself. It was a gift from “God” for all the good things he had done and for continuing to leap.
Kate and Leopold?
The first time I sat down to watch Just Like Heaven, I somehow began when Mark Ruffalo first appeared. I guess I thought my wife had just turned on the movie rather than had been watching it for 15 minutes. The film was so engrossing, like a mystery as Ruffalo’s character tried to figure out what was going on with Witherspoon’s character. When I caught it again, I saw the actual beginning which spelled out everything about Witherspoon’s character. I couldn’t believe how much less interesting it was to watch the two of them piece together a mystery the audience already knew the answer to.
I don’t remember ever seeing this, but your version sounds interesting enough so that I might seek this out to watch it the way you accidentally did the first time.
Source code is a favorite . But I don’t subscribe to the body-stealing problem people have with it . Remember the guy he is in died already ,he and all the rest are gone ,his replacing him is the only way to save the rest of the victims . One instead of thousands is a win .
River and Twelve >>>>> River and any other incarnation.
Husbands of River Song is the best Doctor Who Christmas special.Trying to forge a star-crossed romance between River and the asexual (at first, please forget about Season 7) 11th Doctor just didn’t work.
The way I see it, Eleven and River could flirt but Twelve was the Doctor who could be a proper husband.
The Fountain
The Fountainhead?
Herman’s Head?
A lost classic and clearly the basis for “Inside Out.”
Your Name!!
Seriously!
How dare you. Whatever sins Lost committed, it still gave us “The Constant”.
Came her to say the same thing. An episode so good Anthrax wrote a song about it!
That’s news to me. I’ll have to find it.
Happy to help!
Orville has an episode in Season 2 where they discover a time capsule from the 21st Century and Gordon uses the stored data to recreate the owner, who he falls for but discovers that altering her world to make a romance work changes who she is.Then the final 2 episode arc of Season 2 is about accidentally bringing a younger version of Kelly to the ship and disrupting the timeline with disastrous consequences.
So a whopping two movies, spanning 2004-2005, counts as a “rom com heyday”?
Just Like Heaven, 13 Going on 30, View From The Top, Rumor Has It… I’d say “heyday” qualifies.
Fair. I literally checked imdb and your latter two examples failed to register in my brain even as I was staring at the list.
Why is there a still from “Terminator 2″ in the header image????
Wait, no “About Time”?? Fake news.
Steins;Gate.
No love for SOMEWHERE IN TIME? Kids these days.
Bravo for remembering MADE FOR EACH OTHER , though.
No points lost for missing PETER IBBETSON, but jeez check that one out too.
Yeah, this and “The Constant” were my first two thoughts, and to see neither of them on there was surprising.
*scrolling through list*“Somewhere in Time, Somewhere in Time, where the actual fuck is Somewhere in Time on this list?? I mean … a pop culture site can’t have a list of long distance love stories and miss it out! Can it?”*reaches end of list*“Dammit how is that even possible?? For over 40 years there have been conventions of fans meeting just because they are obsessed with that movie! Could it be anymore AV Club pop culture relevant?”(So, thank you Ham, for at least proving I can still rely on the comments when the article itself goofs!)
I can still rely on the comments when the article itself goofs!———The A.V. Club
Surprised to not see Fitzsimmons.
A love that survived time travel, space travel, multiple timelines, death, Kree slavery, mental illness, robot clones, drowning, brain-scan machines, Hydra, alternate computer matrix realities, and multiple-personality disorder (his: Nazi/hers: Ringu-style ghost-ghoul).
Dark. Hard not to spoil something but Martha and Jonas are rather important to the whole story.
Because I am a giant nerd, just a minor nitpick on the Discovery entry. Stamets isn’t Chief Engineer of Discovery. I don’t believe that person has ever officially been named…maybe Jett Reno? She was Chief Engineer of the ship they found her on in season two. Anyway, Stamets is a science officer and expert on the mycelial network but it’s never hinted that he could do much to repair the warp core or anything.
Desmond and Penny
Their exclusion from this list is a travesty on par with genocide! Okay maybe not but what the fuck?
So… Time-traveling/time-bending romances are my favorite genre of movie. This list left out a pair of Rachel McAdams performances that are worthy of inclusion: About Time, and Midnight in Paris. While I really enjoyed the book The Time Traveler’s Wife, I was pretty disappointed by the movie.
About Time deserves to be on here.Hated Midnight in Paris. It wasn’t Paris, it was just a portal to a stupid author jerkoff dream of something that made him intellectually superior.
So, a Woody Allen movie?
Precisely.
I really liked About Time. And it was nice to see Bill Nighy as the father in a fairly serious dramatic role as opposed to a lot of the genre villain roles he was getting at the time (although I know he’s had dramatic roles since).
SPOILER ALERT?Overall I enjoyed The Time Traveler’s Wife, the book, but was annoyed that the Big Bad Thing they teased that couldn’t be talked about near the end was…SPOILER BELOW……..a series of miscarriages. I realize that miscarriages are bad things and difficult to go through and that six is way more than anyone should have to go through but with all the care put into this sci-fi story I think I was a little thrown off by the Big Bad Evil being something so commonplace and unrelated to time travel. It kinda turned the story into an unremarkable love story with a silly time travel twist thrown in.
It’s been a good decade since I read the book, but I thought the miscarriages were related to the fetuses possibly inheriting the time traveling ability and that’s why she miscarried so many times? Or was that just a fear of theirs that wasn’t true?
I found the book deeply unromantic personally – it seemed like her whole life revolved around him, and she had little say in the matter because he started visiting her when she was a child. And then, knowing he’s about to die, he tells her that she’ll see him again one day? Making her wait for him for the rest of her life, when if she didn’t know he might visit her one more time she might have been able to move on? Ughhhhh.
Granted, only Amy Adams character knew, but the romance in Arrival is definitely a time altered romance.
Agreed to an extent. It wasn’t really primarily about the romance …
Wait a second! Antonia Thomas is British too?! Her American accent is pretty damn good then. Are there ANY Americans on THE GOOD DOCTOR??? 😀
Nope. They’re all ours! Go watch New Amsterdam if you want to see hard-working Americans at wo …oh wait!
How is Somewhere in Time not in this list? It may be older, but that’s the time travel romance movie benchmark.
I just replied to another comment above about this. 12 TV shows and movies where romance transcends space and timeI mean, a movie “where romance transcends space and time” is pretty much the definition of Somewhere in Time. And starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer who just died, you’d think at least one of the contributors to this list would have thought “Oh wait! Guys! How could we forget??”
So, Eternal Sunshine is the only actual classic in this list, right? (Also the book of The Time Traveler’s Wife is a mixture of wish-fulfillment and creepiness and creepy wish-fulfillment. I can’t imagine the film is worse.) But Eternal Sunshine though. Make the list just that.
The Terminator is definitely a classic.
True! I can’t disagree with you there. How would Clementine cope with the Terminator? Pretty well I imagine.
Funnily enough, The Lake House is the one I feel is the most ‘infamous’ on this list. I haven’t even seen it, but its reputation has made waves. Can infamy count as classic?
Paul Stamets is not the Chief Engineer of the USS Discovery. He’s the architect of the spore drive that drives the ship’s other faster-than-light propulsion system and it’s genetically-enhanced navigator.
You forgot 12 Monkeys (the series)
Misfits is a deep cut!
Gwen, I love you for remembering Source Code and Chances Are. Both of these are really cool movies that I unexpectedly loved when I saw them. Chances Are was one of the first movies I saw Robert Downey and thought “This is a guy to watch on the future”
I have my issues with the show, but Stamets-Culber are a really great couple. Adira-Gray are bit too sugary for my tastes, but Wilson Cruz and Anthony Rapp have fantastic chemistry.
Disappointed by the absence of Your Name, which folds body-swapping into its time-travel plot…and masterfully, at that.
A deep cut for sure, but Late for Dinner was a lovely film, a couple of guys get frozen in time, and many years later one tries to get back with his (now much older) wife.. worth it for the interactions of the two main characters.And didn’t Heaven Can Wait also have a love story like this in its film?Just my two cents..