"It turns out that Albert Einstein was wrong. World War IV was fought with neither sticks nor stones, but with the same weapons that made every single one of the World Wars as hellish as they were."
— Walter, opening narration
The Transit Card is a movie currently in planning by Mikuru Fan.
Walter is chosen to go back in time to assassinate the first ruler of the Postend Regime, a dark age set up immediately after Cataclysm. He uses the titular Transit Card, a card that allows the user to use Time Travel and return, to a time period before Cataclysm, when Tolleson is still going to school. He at first fails to find out where Tolleson lives. When he finally accomplishes this, he plans various Zany Schemes in an attempt to complete his task.
He then contemplates whether killing Tolleson is a good idea. While spying on Tolleson, he realizes that he had only known her as a nice girl who did things like helping return fallen baby birds back to their nests (even if she returned them to the wrong nest). Then Cataclysm starts. Somehow, he decides that Tolleson is worth saving and decides to protect her in its duration. Walter, somehow, loses the card and is unable to return to the future. He ends up staying, marrying her, and helping her fix the world. He quickly finds out the truth about the Postend regime. Things get much worse from there.
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Beware of spoilers ahead.
This work provides examples of:
- Arisenia and Bob: Some of the characters' first names are unusual compared to their relatively familiar surnames.
- After the End: The time period from Tolleson's rule to Walter's childhood.
- All There in the Manual: Many pieces of information, such as the character names and background as well has the timeline of World War IV, are in the special features.
- Anyone Can Die
- Bait-and-Switch: From the first scenes, one would expect the story to go along the lines of Walter failing at his job of assassinating Tolleson, losing his transit card in Cataclysm, getting discovered, and getting sent to the concentration camp.
- Bittersweet Ending: The Postend Regime is overthrown and Walter is freed from the contentration camp, just three days before the date of his scheduled execution. He celebrates his 65th birthday in peace. He dies in the hospital a few days later, knowing that the new government will take steps to preventing something like this from happening ever again.
- Black Comedy: The assassination attempts are Played for Laughs.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: ...But the torture is not.
- Crapsack World: The Postend Regime, after Mariana takes power, very, very much.
- Shortages of supplies are widespread. Three famines have occured during Mariana's rule. Supplies were often taken by the military.
- The regime also executes all senior citizens, calling them a drain on resources. Women are executed at menopause and men at the age of 65 with no exceptions. Even Mariana himself gets executed because of this rule.
- The concentration camps. See Hellhole Prison below.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?
- The Crapsack World itself. See A Nazi by Any Other Name below.
- The various failed assassination attempts Walter tries on Tolleson are reminescent of the CIA's assassination attempts on Fidel Castro.
- Dystopia: The Postend Regime after Mariana takes power.
- The End of the World as We Know It: Walter was meant to take advantage of it to kill Tolleson. In reality, Walter saves Tolleson from it.
- Face–Heel Turn: Walter does this in the point of view of his organization when he abandons his task and protects Tolleson. He tells two other time travelers to leave Tolleson alone.
- Fate Worse than Death
- Forced to Watch: Walter is forced to watch the execution of his wife Tolleson in the same room as her.
- Foreshadowing: The history lesson at the beginning is full of this for Walter's fate.
- Genre-Busting: Could fit as a romance/time travel/assassination/disaster/dystopia/black comedy. More simplistically, a Cold War-era CIA and Holocaust allegory with romantic and disaster movie elements.
- How We Got Here: Begins with Walter at the concentration camp, hit being liberated, and him standing on the roof of the hospital, viewing the ruins of a city.
- Hellhole Prison: The people who get sent to the Postend concentration camps are the lucky ones.
- Random experiments are run on the prisoners. Vivisections are common. A disproportionate amount of women get vivisected.
- The prisoners are often tortured not only physically but psychologically as well.
- Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act
- The assassination of Tolleson might be considered an In-Universe version of this trope.
- Mentioned when Walter contemplates over whether killing Tolleson would do anything to save his future.
Walter: They might as well have sent me to kill Hitler! - Homage: The time travel sequence resembles the Beyond the Infinite sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- Ironic Echo
- Just Before the End: The time period of Tolleson's childhood.
- Just in Time: The Postend Regine falls just three days before Walter's 65th birthday, the date of his scheduled execution.
- Karma Houdini: It's not likely that Organization will ever find out that Mariana was the real bad guy.
- Kudzu Plot: Deliberately so.
- Mind Rape
- Mind Screw: The time travel and often unexplained details could really mess the viewers up.
- Mood Whiplash: The first part of the film was a Black Comedy about an awkward time-traveling boy assigned to assassinate a girl. He gives up on the task and the two become romantically involved, later to be married. It then turns into a world-fixing montage with Tolleson rising to power. Then Mariana forces Tolleson to resign, when Walter and Tolleson both get shipped off to a concentration camp far away. Walter sees Tolleson get executed right in front of him and spends most of his remaining life in the concentration camp, subject to random experiments.
- A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Postend Regime under Mariana.
- Look at the flag. It's red with a white circle inside it. Subtle.
- The concentration camps. Even more so that the prisoners are transported there in vehicles meant for goods.
- No Woman's Land: The Postend Regime, which would much more easily persecute and kill women. Ironically, the leader was a woman. It turns out that this happened under Mariana's rule, not Tolleson's.
- Opening Narration
- Playing with Syringes: Used by the concentration camps on the prisoners.
- Rousseau Was Right: Played straight in execution, inverted in the timeline, and later subverted. Tolleson was first described as a cruel tyrant where millions of innocent people were killed under the government, an opinion largely shared. When Walter travels back to Tolleson's childhood, he only sees her as a nice person. Subverted in that Tolleson was nice all along - it was Mariana, who succeeded her, who committed the atrocities.
- Samus Is a Girl: It's not revealed that Tolleson is a girl until her first on-screen appearance.
- Scenery Gorn: The shots of Tolleson's hometown completely devastated, especially of Consolidated School.
- Scenery Porn
- Stable Time Loop: The history lesson at the beginning has a passing mention of Tolleson's spouse. It turns out that Walter is that spouse. He saves Tolelson and ends up fulfilling the events he studied in school.
- Those Two Guys: Sumner and Bayard in Organization, Lasalle and Walton in the concentration camp.
- Time Travel
- War Is Hell
- Water Wake Up: Tolleson first does this to Walter as a prank. It's used again on Walter later when he's about to be tortured.
- World War Whatever: World War IV took place soon After the End. It is implied that World War III was not fought with nukes.
- Would Hit a Girl: Walter had no problems with assassinating a girl.
- Zany Scheme: Walter's assassination attempts on Tolleson.
