'Lorong Waktu' Is the Only Sci-Fi Series About Time Travel and Islam You'll Ever Need to Watch

It wouldn't feel like the Holy Month in Indonesia without the annual Ramadan-themed sinetron series. There's a pretty simple formula to these Islamic soap operas. You need a laid-back kyai, a bad boy on the verge of going good, and a beautiful Muslim woman in a hijab. It wouldn't hurt to have Deddy Mizwar in the credits either. Mix all that together and you end up with Kiamat Sudah Dekat. Or Para Pencari Tuhan. Or Hikayat Pengembara.

But one Ramadan sinetron rose above the rest. Lorong Waktu, literally "Time Lane," was, on the surface, a typical Ramadan series. It had all the sinetron standards. Deddy Mizwar? Check. An Islamic love story? Check. Comedians providing the laughs? Check. A moral lesson drawn from the Quran? Check.

You know what else it had? Time travel. That's right, Pak Haji (Deddy Mizwar) wasn't just going around teaching a bunch of ex-cons how to be good Muslim men. No, he was traveling through time and space, visiting futures that looked suspiciously like Indonesia in the early aughts. And then he handed out the episode's moral lesson. You always need that moral lesson.

To an outsider, this might not seem that special, but you need to know that there was nothing else like it on Indonesian television at the time. It ran for six seasons, appearing every Ramadan between 1999 and 2006, except for a break in 2002. Lorong Waktu was the first attempt at a sci-fi series by an Indonesian television network, and it is still one of the best.

In sci-fi from abroad, time travel allows characters to change their fate. They do something in the past and then bam, they are suddenly rich and powerful back in their present. You can see this plot roughly replicated in time travel classics like Back to the Future II and even lo-fi indies like Primer.

But Lorong Waktu isn't concerned with these time travel tropes. No one in Lorong Waktu wanted to travel through time to change their own lives for the better. No, Pak Haji and crew time travel in Lorong Waktu to deepen or restore people's faith. It's time travel as ikhtiar and by going against the tropes it allowed Deddy Mizwar to offer audiences a Sharia-friendly take on time travel, while also keeping the plots as simple as possible. Because remember, this is a Ramadan show. When your target audience is starving and tired, it's probably best to keep things light and simple.

In Islam, we have the term Qona'ah. It means to be grateful for what you have. Lorong Waktu is as pure a manifestation as Qona'ah as you're going to find on TV. Indonesians have a habit of taking futuristic scripts too far—remember Panji Manusia Milenium and Saras 008?

Lorong Waktu dodged this bullet by understanding the limitations of sinetron and remaining grateful for what they had: a lame-looking time machine and only one computer that needed to be used by nearly every character. And it's this sense of Qona'ah that helped make Lorong Waktu the cult hit it is today.

The sinetron was eventually cancelled after its seventh season. And then Deddy Mizwar went on to repeat his role as Pak Haji in Kiamat Sudah Dekat, setting off a never-ending series of typecast roles that were about as diverse as Johnny Depp's film career.

But you can still watch most of the series for free on YouTube. Now only if someone out there would remake the series. Someone with an eye for what makes the classics so good. I'm looking at you Joko Anwar. I'm praying that you'll scrap those plans for a Pengabdi Setan remake and get on the Lorong Waktu time travel train instead.

Amen.