13 Planet Of The Apes Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

6. Cornelius And Zire Were There Own Great-Grandparents

When Paul Dehn took over as screenwriter for the POTA sequels, he inherited 'Hasslein's theory of time' from Rod Serling. The concept expanded in ESCAPE, when the energy released by the Alpha-Omega Bomb propelled Cornelius and Zira in the opposite direction along the same warp. And so the original Apes cycle, at the halfway point, became the saga of how a loop in time allowed a reverse-evolutionary future to subvert the present. As the President recognised in SF writer Jerry Pournelle's novelisation of ESCAPE, the arrival of Caesar's parents and the threat it posed was a paradox: "If they didn't come here to be their own great-great grandparents, they couldn't exist at all." Thus evolution, like time, has become curved or circular, circumnavigating its own linear development.