Essential Question: Who gets to tell the story — and whose voice is missing?
Hook — 2 minutes
Rate Your Fear
Think of the scariest thing you've had to do — not dangerous, just something you really didn't want to face.
1Mildly uncomfortable
2
3Genuinely scared
4
5Absolutely terrifying
Now think: When you were afraid, did fear change what you saw and how you acted?
Share with a partner — then we'll hear a few responses.
Where We Are in the Story
Quick recap before we go underground
The Eloi — Surface
Beautiful, gentle, childlike
Do no work of any kind
Terrified of the dark
Completely helpless without support
Look like the "winners" of history
The Morlocks — Underground
Pale, large-eyed, nocturnal
Operate all the machinery
Come to the surface only at night
The Time Traveller is deeply afraid of them
Look like the "losers" of history
The Time Machine has been stolen. The only way home is underground.
Two Days of Waiting
He knows he has to go. He waits anyway.
"There was a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies... they were filthily cold to the touch."
Physical disgust — his body rebels before his mind decides
He has absorbed the Eloi's prejudices — their fear has quietly become his
Fear of the unknown — what is actually down there?
And finally he acts — "rather hastily... for I feared my courage might leak away."
He doesn't go to understand. He goes because he has absolutely no other choice.
Think • Pair • Share
What Don't You Want to Know?
The Time Traveller avoids...
Facing the underground reality that maintains everything comfortable on the surface.
Most of us avoid...
Where and how our clothes were made
Who cleans this building after we leave
Conditions in factories that make our phones
What the people serving our food actually earn
1:30
remaining
Talk to your partner: What's one thing you know you'd rather not think about?
Going Down
200 yards underground. No quick way back.
Surface — sunlight, the Eloi, the world he knows
↓
Metal rungs built for smaller beings — the light fades
↓
The sound of machinery grows louder below him
↓
Complete darkness — Morlock territory
The ladder was built for them — not for visiting Victorian scientists. Down here, he is the outsider.
First Contact: Touch in the Dark
They cannot clearly see each other. Both are afraid.
"A soft hand touched my face..."
What the Time Traveller notices:
"White creatures" retreating from his light
Large eyes that reflect like nocturnal animals
A different language — he can't communicate
His immediate reaction:
He calls them "creatures" — not people.
He has decided what they are before he has learned a single thing about them.
That soft hand reaching out in the dark was a greeting — maybe even a gesture of curiosity. How does this encounter look from the Morlock's side?
The Underground World
Not chaos. Not primitive. Something the Time Traveller doesn't want to admit.
⚙
Vast machinery A fully functioning industrial civilization operating below the surface
💨
Air systems Ventilation keeping the surface world breathable — maintained by Morlocks
🍽
Food preparation Something deeply disturbing about what, exactly, they are preparing
📌
Organized workspace Not primitive chaos — a structured, functioning society
🏠
Built everything above Every comfort the Eloi enjoy was made and maintained down here
👀
The Time Traveller Describes it all in the language of horror — not curiosity or analysis
Language Analysis — Click Each Word
The Words He Chooses
The Time Traveller thinks he's being objective. His language tells a different story.
Creatures
Human rats
Nauseatingly inhuman
Obscene figures
Lurking
Filthily cold to the touch
Click a word to analyze it
Where have you heard this kind of language used about real groups of people today?
Perspective Activity — Click the Card
What if You're the Morlock?
The same moment. A completely different experience.
The Time Traveller's Account
Strange, pale "creatures" lurk in the dark.
They are threatening, disgusting, inhuman.
He prepares to defend himself.
↻ Click to see the other perspective
A Morlock's Experience?
A huge, strange being descends into our home without permission.
It carries a device that blinds our eyes, adapted for darkness.
We reach out carefully — a gesture of curiosity. It recoils from us.
We built everything that keeps their world running. They have never once come to say thank you.
Wells never gives us a Morlock's voice. That silence is part of the point.
Who Actually Has the Power?
Everything the Time Traveller assumed is backwards.
The Eloi
✓ Beautiful, comfortable
✓ Live in luxury on the surface
✓ Appear to be in charge
✗ Cannot feed themselves
✗ Cannot maintain anything
✗ Totally, helplessly dependent
depends entirely on→
The Morlocks
✗ Considered ugly, inferior
✗ Forced underground
✗ Treated as servants — or worse
✓ Operate all the machinery
✓ Produce all food and materials
✓ Have every practical skill
The "beautiful" people are helpless. The "ugly" people have every skill that matters.
Essential Workers: Sound Familiar?
This pattern did not end in 802,701 AD.
💉
During COVID: Who was labeled "essential"? Who actually received adequate protection?
🚪
Sanitation workers: What happens to a city within days when they go on strike?
🍔
Food service: Who earns minimum wage feeding everyone who earns more?
🏠
Building maintenance: Who keeps infrastructure running — usually at night, out of sight?
The most essential work often comes with the least pay, the least respect, and the least visibility.
Essential Question: What happens when entire groups are left out of the benefits of progress?
The Discovery He Cannot Face
Sometimes the truth is worse than the fear.
Fresh meat found in the underground food preparation area
↓
No large animals have survived to the year 802,701
↓
"Too horrible!" — even the Time Traveller cannot say it directly
Wells' warning: When you treat people as though they are livestock — eventually, the reversal comes.
Wells' Warning in Four Steps
The Victorian class system — taken to its logical extreme
1
Separation
Rich and poor live completely separate lives — different spaces, different worlds
→
2
Dependence
The upper class loses every practical skill. The lower class maintains them all.
→
3
Reversal
The "servants" hold all the power they need. The "masters" are helpless.
→
!
Collapse
Both groups are destroyed by the system neither of them chose or created
Wells wrote this in 1895. What was happening in Britain that made him imagine this warning?
What He Still Cannot See
The narrator is the unreliable one.
His actual response to what he finds:
Physical flight — he literally runs away
Emotional denial — he cannot process what he's seen
Prepares for violence — not conversation or understanding
Returns immediately to the surface and its comfortable prejudices
What he entirely misses:
The Morlocks may have valid reasons for what they do
They are surviving a system they did not create
He never once attempts to communicate with them
He focuses on his own horror rather than the cause of the system
Critical Question: What if the Morlocks are the ones responding logically to an unjust system? What would it take for the Time Traveller to see that?
Personal Reflection — Writing Time
Journal Prompt
Think about a time when you discovered something uncomfortable about a system you were part of — or that you benefited from.
Maybe it was where something you own was made. Maybe it was how someone in your community was being treated. Maybe it was about your own school, family, or neighborhood.
How did you react? Did you change anything — or did you find ways to stop yourself from thinking about it?
5:00
writing time
Setting Up What's Coming
The same pattern — different eras, different forms, different answers
The Time Machine (1895)
Underground labor hidden below a surface paradise.
The question: What happens when workers become invisible to the people they support?
Metropolis (1927)
A literal underground worker city beneath a city of pleasure and art.
The question: What does it take to make the invisible visible — and who has to risk everything to do it?
Black Panther (2018)
A hidden civilization and the question of global inequality.
The question: Who gets to imagine and build the future — and what happens when they refuse to stay hidden?
All three texts ask: Who is hidden? Who benefits from that hiding? And what happens when it ends?
Coming Back to Our Essential Questions
Question 1: Why do we tell stories about the future when we're really talking about today?
Question 2: Who gets to imagine the future — and why does that matter?
H.G. Wells wrote about the year 802,701.
He was really writing about 1895.
And he was asking questions about us.
Exit Ticket: One sentence — whose voice is missing from Chapter 6, and what difference would it make if we heard it?
Next: Metropolis (1927) — When the underground stops working