I was playing with retrograde motion recently by walking through my living room and then stopping, and moving backward, just to get the feel for it in my body. I realized that with retrograde motion, there is a separation of time and space because I couldn’t represent both time moving forward and me, the planet, moving backward,in my body. There was a split that had to occur. In fact, slightly different from your interpretation, time seemed to only move forward, while it was motion in space that moves backward. One way or another, my experience caused me to to understand that there is a stepping out of what we perceive as a constant intersection of time and space that happens with retrograde motion – not just in science fiction, but regularly in our lives.

MT