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Time Agent 1: Captain, why did you take the Defiant back in time? Sisko: It was an accident. Time Agent 1: So you're not contending it was a predestination paradox? Time Agent 2: A time loop - that you were meant to go back into the past? Sisko: No. Time Agent 1: Good. Time Agent 2: We hate those.
Through Applied Phlebotinum, Functional Magic, or some other means, our heroes travel back to the past. In the past, they wind up being responsible for the very events that underpin their own "present." This creates a chicken-and-egg scenario, in which the looping sequence of events has no clear beginning. The result of breaking the law zero of time travel: do not cause the event you went back to prevent.
This is sometimes referred to a "time loop" paradox, particularly when a character, object, or piece of information was never originally created, but exists solely because of its own existence. Also known as a "bootstrap paradox," from the classic Heinlein short story, By His Bootstraps. It's also called an "ontological paradox" on that other Wiki .
Tricked Out Time is when you "change" the past on purpose to resemble this.
Contrast Temporal Paradox. Compare You Cant Fight Fate, Wayback Trip, Timey Wimey Ball.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- In Simoun, Dominura and Limone travel back in time using the Emerald Ri Maajon, purportedly to stop Simulacrum from using the Simoun. To avoid a Temporal Paradox that would prevent them from meeting, however, they instead teach the very Emerald Ri Maajon that got them there to the local inhabitants and show them how to use the Simoun that they have lying around... thereby ensuring that history unfolds exactly as they remember.
- In El Hazard The Magnificent World, the main character and company are sent to El Hazard by Ifurita. They meet her in El Hazard, but as an enemy who doesn't remember them. After a Heel Face Turn, Ifurita rescues everyone from a time-space distortion weapon, and realizes that she must be caught in it in order to go back in time in order to start everything.
- Kagome from Inuyasha could theoretically use future knowledge to inform her current adventures, but (as described in Just Eat Gilligan) she never does.
- Admittedly, as anything to do with her adventures would be considered myth by the rest of her time period, it would most likely be very hard to locate any reliable information other than something along the lines of "we win".
- Takahashi's Fire Tripper one-shot story (in some ways a dry run for Inuyasha), avoids the trope almost completely. One can trace the time lines of both characters, and they never "loop" themselves. There is one small loop though that leads to a Fridge Logic moment after the show is over. Where did the bell come from?
- Mendo from Urusei Yatsura traveled to the past to try to prevent himself from acquiring his fear of darkness and cramped spaces, but he got so angry at his younger self that he ended up attacking his younger self and thereby causing his own phobias.
- In Martian Successor Nadesico, Inez Fressange, whose first clear memory is being lost in a desert at age 8, discovers that she got there through time traveling from the future... which is now the present, as she's taken The Slow Path back. She meets her younger self just before the temporal disturbance that triggers the loop.
- In Tenchi Muyo in Love!, the criminal Kain attempts to go back in time to kill Tenchi's mother, Achika, so as to prevent Tenchi from ever having been born. Tenchi and company go back in time to stop him, and the climactic showdown forces Achika to utilize her power to the point that she shortens her own lifespan in order to protect her future son, thus causing her premature death that Tenchi had already experienced in the present/future.
- During the (rather long) Day 1 of the Mahora Fair sub-arc in Mahou Sensei Negima we get to see a Time Loop following Negi's use of it. Negi redoes the same day four times to make sure he has enough time to spend with every student. At various points Negi will run into students he hasn't run into yet because he's not that far in the loop. Setsuna, Asuna, Konoka, Yue, and Kotaro all go along with Negi at one time or another in this loop. Naturally when Time Travel isn't a neat parlor trick it stops being so stable... or loop like, and quite wibbly-wobbly.
- The Suzumiya Haruhi novels get really complex about this, in that there are multiple time loops running in the same time-plane. At one point, there are four Kyons and three Mikurus existing simultaneously.
- In Sailor Moon, Chibi-Usa is able to exist because she "stole" the silver crystal from Usagi in the future, returned to the past, and saved Usagi's life in the battle with the Death Phantom.
- Would the universe then cease to exist if the silver crystal breaks?
Comic Books
- Brilliantly subverted in the comic strip Calvin And Hobbes. It's 6:30 and Calvin doesn't want to do his homework, so he decides to Time Travel forward to 8:30. Then he can pick up the now-finished homework, bring it back to 6:30, and let it sit on the desk until it'll be there to pick up at 8:30. But it doesn't work. There's no homework to pick up at 8:30 because Calvin never actually did the homework — he went time traveling instead.
- The best part came, of course, when they BOTH decided to go after 7:30 Calvin, because he was the one who was supposed to be doing it. That didn't work either.
- This editor remembers a short sci-fi story where a king who is is always coming up with crazy schemes to improve his small country discovers a time traveler is helping his advisers prevent the negative impact of his schemes. He captures the time traveler and forces him to take them both into the future so he can see the results of his schemes. They arrive in ten years in the future where the country is prosperous beyond his wildest dreams, and he asks a passerby "what was the big change that brought about this golden age?" He answers "Oh, it all turned around when the crazy king disappeared ten years ago and the advisers started ruling the nation". As the king wonders why he disappeared a decade ago, the time traveler shuts the door to his time machine, leaving the king in the future.
- In The Invisibles, Gideon is introduced to The Invisible College by an elderly Edith Manning, who recognises him as a time-traveller from her youth. After entering the college, he is taught to time-travel, which results in him going back and meeting her as a young woman...
- The elves in Elf Quest are only on the planet because their alien ancestors ("the coneheads," later termed "the High Ones") were attracted by the human tales of elven beings. The coneheads shapeshifted into elven beings and turned their spacecraft into a palace, then, as they were landing, were flung back to the caveman days, where all their powers stopped working and they were nearly killed. The few survivors founded some cultures that became the elves that begat the stories that prompted the coneheads to attempt to land in the first place.
- Later on, the magic-user Rayek attempts to stop the event that flung the High Ones into the past. It's pointed out that those who were born as a result of this event would cease to exist should he succeed, but he doesn't care (except, it seems, for the few he knows personally). He's talked out of it by the three people most dear to him, who choose to suffer the same fate as the planet; as Rayek can't bring himself to erase them, he stands aside and lets the event happen as it already has.
- In the Marvel Universe Cable was infected by a techno-organic virus by Apocalypse, who, it is revealed later, got the virus in the past from Cable.
- In the Elseworlds book Superman: Red Son, it's revealed that Superman was sent back in time as a baby, because Lex Luthor was the ancestor of Jor-L, and therefore Krypton is actually Earth in future. That might explain why the Red Son-verse doesn't have Kryptonite.
- Ironic in that Jor-L sends his son in the past, as opposed to another planet, because he dislikes how placid humanity as become. Humans think they've learned all there is to learn and now just "have nothing left to do but wait and die". Jor-L hopes that sending his son in the past will change that. However, the antagonism between Superman and Lex Luthor is what inspires Luthor to engineer Humanity's Golden Age, Jor-L hopes to avert.
- The final pages of Ultimate [1] #53 show that Reed sends his Cosmic Cube back in time 30,000 years to the planet Acheron, where Thanos finds it, which precipitated his rise; when he lost it, he influenced Reed to create it.
- In Tales From the Bully Pulpit, Teddy Roosevelt gets help from the "Teddy of thirty minutes from now" (a reference to the Bill and Ted example below). At the end of the story, the main characters remember to go back and fulfill the time loop before going off on their adventures.
Film
- In The Terminator, the world-ruling SkyNet computer attempts to defeat the human resistance by sending a Terminator android back in time to kill the mother of resistance leader John Connor before he was born; not only does the Terminator fail, it turns out that if SkyNet had not made the attempt, Sarah Connor would not have met John's father and John would not have existed.
- In addition, the sequel (and a deleted scene from the first film) reveals that the technology used to create SkyNet was developed by researchers studying the remains of the Terminator android. Thus, the SkyNet technology was never invented by anyone, but came into existence within the time loop.
- Then in the sequel to that, the Terminatrix reprograms SkyNet tech to awaken it, thus resulting in the Machine Rebellion, which ultimately leads to that same SkyNet sending back the Terminatrix to awaken itself...
- Also, in the first film Kyle tells Sarah a message John gave him to memorize. In the second film we see that Sarah has given the message to John, so he can give it to Reese. So who wrote the thing?
- A very, very detailed analysis of the time loops in the Terminator series is available here.
- Twelve Monkeys has this structure.
- Star Trek IV does this with the invention of transparent aluminum.
- Donnie Darko: The entire movie takes place in an unstable time loop, and the whole plot centers on trying to close it. When Donnie transports himself and the jet engine that killed him back in time, it closes the loop and negates everything that happens in the movie. However, this is never explicitly stated, resulting in a certain amount of Mind Screw.
- Bill And Teds Excellent Adventure: The titular characters save themselves four times using this concept. We can only assume they got it right all four times, because it works all four times. In general, the film appears to assert that you can't actually change a timeline.
- The Final Countdown features another one. The USS Nimitz goes back in time from the early 1980s to just before Pearl Harbor. During their trip, one of their crew is left on an island and ends up staying there. Forty years later, he's running a defense company and helped design the carrier in the first place.
- In Somewhere In Time, there is a watch that an old lady gives to Richard Collier. Later on, Richard Collier goes into the past and gives the pocket watch to the much younger lady, who keeps it until the present. Also, Richard Collier's signature from the past in the book in the present - indicating that his trip into the past will be successful.
- In Portrait of Jennie, a black-and-white film which may have partially inspired ''Somewhere in Time'', the protagonist meets a little girl in very old-fashioned clothing who tells him to wait for her to grow up; he realizes that he's seen her before in the titular portrait in the art museum, and after meeting her again (and falling in love) learns that she actually committed suicide years ago while waiting for someone.
- According to Miller in Repo Man, all of human history is a Stable Time Loop. Of course, he doesn't seem the most reliable source on these things, although the rather drug-fueled ending makes it seem a bit more likely.
- In Back To The Future, Marty inspires Chuck Berry to write Johnny B. Goode by performing it in the past, giving him the ability to perform that song in the first place.
- In Time Rider, the protagonist from the present unwittingly goes back to the wild west and meets an attractive young woman. After getting to know her (at her insistence), she asks about a necklace, which he claims his grandmother gave him. Through the course of the film, he gradually realizes that no, these aren't a bunch of really intense historical re-enactors, while she comes to understand that he really is from the future. Just before he returns to the present, she snatches the necklace and holds it up, wordlessly and clearly explaining why she did it and who she will become. Squick
- In Split Infinity, A.J. goes back back in time (via Mental Time Travel) to 1929. It turns out that she was responsible for saving the house and the barn from the stock market crash.
- In Grizzy Mountain, two kids go back in time to 1871. They're the ones who are responsible for keeping Grizzly Mountain from being blown up, and allowing the Natives to keep their land.
Literature
- In The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, the protagonist, Brendan Doyle, becomes the victim of a body swap in the 1800s and realizes that he is destined to be the poet, William Ashbless, whom he was researching in the present day. Partway through the book, he panics on realizing nobody ever wrote Ashbless's poetry - he copied it from memory earlier - but then shrugs it off, deciding that as long as it was there, nobody would be bothered.
- The Robert A Heinlein short story "'—All You Zombies—'" uses the same device. The protagonist tells a bartender a story in which he introduces his mother, actually himself before a sex change, to his father, actually himself after the sex change. He is also the bartender.
- A short story by Anne Lear, "The Adventure of the Global Traveller," has Sherlock Holmes' nemesis Moriarty steal the Time Machine (from H.G. Wells' story), only to have it break down (and completely disintegrate) on the stage of the Globe during the first performance of Macbeth. Moriarty recites the Third Murderer's lines as he recalls them from reading the play; afterwards, Shakespeare is delighted with the new lines and writes them into the script. Like the Ashbless poetry - no one ever wrote the lines, the first time they were spoken it was from memory...
- Time travel in the Dragonriders Of Pern books by Anne McCaffrey operates on this principle. All time travel is undertaken knowing this in advance ("since I've already done it, I might as well go do it..."), and no one ever calls the universe's bluff.
- Not always. Some of it's of the form "I think I'm the one who did it, so I'd better go do it..."
- The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is full of stable time loops. For example, on one of Henry's visits to his wife-to-be Clare in the past, he dictates to her a list of dates in her childhood when they're going to meet. They meet on those dates only because she knows he's going to appear — there are some other times when he appears, but since those dates aren't on the list, she doesn't know he's there. When they meet as adults in real time, she gives the list back to him so he can memorise it. Where did it come from in the first place? Seemingly nowhere. Henry also taught his younger self a number of skills he knew he would need, such as how to pick locks. His theory is that to prevent Temporal Paradox, he has free will while he's living in normal time but not while he's time traveling.
- The Discworld novel The Last Continent is essentially a single, but quite complex, Stable Time Loop, in which the problem Rincewind has to solve is caused by the wizards accidentally going back in time while looking for him. It also includes Ridcully dismissing Ponder Stibbons' worries about the Butterfly Of Doom (or Ant Of Doom in Ponder's example) by concluding that history depends on you treading on the ants you've already trodden on.
- Specifically, Ridcully's argument relies on the old "you can't step on an ant if you don't exist." His logic is that if they're in the past NOW, then they've already been there thousands of years ago, when it was now. Therefore, anything they do, they've already done (because it's the past and the past has already happened), and it's vitally important that they do whatever they do, because if they didn't, they wouldn't have done it and they'd have done the different thing instead.
- Pratchett also uses this in Pyramids, where a major character, through a method of semi-immortality, has been trapped in an 8000 year loop for an unknown number of go-rounds.
- Night Watch also features a stable time loop, though Vimes is warned in the beginning that it doesn't have to be.
- Night Watch is more an example of Ontological Inertia than Stable Time Loop - Vimes is told that there was a real Sergeant Keel the first time around, and while the general outcome is the same, several of the specific events are different.
- On a smaller scale, minor recurring character Mrs. Cake is a psychic who is known to answer peoples' questions before they ask them; she then insists they ask, to stabilize the time loop, or she'll get a migraine.
- In Jack Chalker's Downtiming The Night Side, a modern-day security officer is drawn into a time-loop by an incident instigated by himself, a time-travelling, gender-swapped version of himself, and their estranged children, none of whom would exist had he not been pulled into the time loop in the first place.
- Not to mention they go back and close down each time loop so that they never actually happened, leaving the protagonist *very* confused as to how he/she is even still existing. The person she's with tells her basically to shut up and deal with it.
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Harry is saved by a mysterious figure who he thinks is his father. After he travels back, he eventually finds himself in the same place and waits for his father to show up... and then realizes ''he'' was the mysterious figure, and saves himself. Also, as Harry, Ron, and Hermione first head out to adventure, they hear noises that turn out to be Harry and Hermione as they complete adventure!part II.
- In the Thursday Next Novel Eyre Affair, Thursday meets herself, and receives the news that the Big Bad is alive, and is told to travel to Swindon. As a result of the travel, she ends up caught in an patch of Bad Time, and arrives to deliver the message.
- Later in the series, it's revealed that the various methods of time travel work on the assumption that someone will invent time travel, and deliver that technology to their current time. This starts causing trouble when people find that time-travel won't be invented.
- Also, Thursday's father gives her his chronometer. He got it years ago from her, after she got it from him.
- A debate runs throughout the book about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays. At the end of the book, Thursday's dad, a time traveler, reveals that no one wrote the plays; when he went back in time to the corresponding period, the plays weren't around. So, he gave them to Shakespeare to produce. Thursday's dad tells her not to worry about where the plays actually came from, as these things happen often.
- In The Last Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant Linden travels to the past to get the Staff of Law, since it is nowhere to be found in the present, since she picked it up in the past...
- And because she picked it up in the past it didn't exist during the intervening years, meaning that Lord Foul and his allies grew stronger because its power wasn't opposing them for all that time.
- In Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe and Everything, the poet Lallafa was known for writing beautiful poetry on habra leaves in the middle of a rainforest... So some time travelers picked him up from the rainforest and put him on the talk show circuit in the future. Of course, he had to write the poems at some point, so they just sent him back to the forest with a book of his poetry and a bunch of habra leaves...
- Of course the whole thing was an advertising ploy by the manufacturers of correction fluid
- Far from the only Stable Time Loop in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Arthur, of course, met with Agrajag before one of the many deaths of his previous forms had ever occurred, and so he knows that he's going to be able to escape when Agrajag tries to kill him anyway. Also, the entire arc with the Golgafrinchams.
- In The Green Futures of Tycho by William Sleator, the protagonist learns to use his time machine from his future self, who only knows how to use the machine because he learned it from himself.
- In the story The Red Queen's Race by Isaac Asimov, an attempt to change history by sending modern scientific knowledge back to the ancient Greeks is subverted when the person translating the information finds out about the plan. The translator creates a Stable Time Loop by censoring the translation to include only odd bits of surprisingly advanced knowledge that actually turned up in the ancient world. Also, it's decided that doing this was necessary for history to happen as it already did.
- A Stable Time Loop also occurs, and is a major plot twist, in Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity, where the loop is the creation of the Knights Templar Eternity organization done by one of its own members (who was a rookie!). However, in the end, time was malleable and the main characters managed to break out of the loop by altering events in such a manner as to make the loop impossible.
- Possibly subverted in the Star Trek Deep Space Nine Expanded Universe trilogy Millennium, which involves a convoluted Quasi-Stable Time Loop in which the actions of a future Picard, Vash, and Nog help cause the creation of their alternate future, followed by the retroactive destruction of that same future. During the story both Dax and Miles O'Brien continually insist on maintaining a Stable Time Loop, but by the end it seems their actions can only succeed because of three people who shouldn't exist.
- At one point in The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi, four copies of Kyon and three of Mikuru exist at the same time.
- In the Warhammer 40000 novel Desert Raiders, a Tallarn regiment is dispatched to an uninhabited planet to investigate a mysterious psychic distress call. After landing on the planet, the regiment encounters a Tyranid splinter group and is forced into a desperate last stand. One of the psykers traveling with the regiment dispatches a warning signal in their final moments — the same signal the regiment had been sent to investigate in the first place. The implication is that, in traveling through the Warp, they had gone back in time before reaching their destination; indeed, the Warp in the 40K 'verse is known to do some strange things to the flow of time...
- The entire plot of Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox.
- In Animorphs, In the Time of Dinosaurs, the Animorphs go back in time to the Cretaceous, fight the antlike alien Nesk for a nuke to explode (so that they can undo the time travel) and the Nesk divert a comet to the only home of the Mercora (the friendly aliens). The Mercora wanted the nuke so that they can explode and stop the comet from hitting, but Tobias and Ax rig the nuke not to explode, as the comet was the one that ended the dinosaurs (opening the way for humans to evolve). The force of the comet ends up sending the Animorphs back home.
- Dragonlance Legends reveals that humans, elves, and ogres can time-travel only to observe. This is how it's supposed to work. Throw in the unnatural races, which were not created at the beginning of time, like dwarves, gnomes, and kender, and you have problems. So, Raistlin would be caught in a stable time loop which essentially just causes him to kill himself over and over again every 400-odd years...if it weren't for Tas and his powers of TemporalParadox.
- The Robert L. Forward novel Timemaster demonstrates the use of a stable time loop generated by a wormhole (technically, a "closed timelike curve") as an offensive weapon.
- Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock: Karl Glogauer tracks down the real Jesus, son of Mary, and finds that he's an idiot; so he ....
Live Action TV
- Babylon 5 has two of these, related to the same incident. A two-part episode in the third season has the protagonists cause the mysterious time incident on Babylon 4 that happened in the first season... at the conclusion of which, an important character travels back even farther in time to become the cause of one of the show's central prophecies.
- In the first season of the new series of Doctor Who, The Doctor and Rose are followed everywhere by the words "Bad Wolf" - in the final episode, Rose saves The Doctor's life and uses the time-bending power of the TARDIS to deposit the words in the past, in order to inspire her to go forward into the future and save The Doctor's life, which ends in her putting the words into the past, etc., etc. This also crops up a few times in the second and third seasons (since the words were placed all over time and space, there's no reason for them to stop showing up just because they're not needed anymore), and more times than you can shake a TARDIS key at in the Ten/Rose Expanded Universe novel The Stone Rose. The phrase also turns at the cliffhanger of the fourth season episode "Turn Left" (with all written words, from the Doctor's point of view being replaced with "Bad Wolf" — even the TARDIS' signage), in which it heralds Davros' gambit to steal a number of planets in a plan that will either end up in the Daleks' domination of the universe or by the universe's destruction
- The episode "Blink" also repeatedly uses it. At one point, the Doctor pre-records his half of a conversation with another character; when the other character has the conversation, it's written down, and the Doctor works off it to record his half. Also, his half is recorded as an easter egg on 17 specific DVDs; when the Doctor tells a video executive which discs to put the recording on, he's working from a list someone in the future made of DVDs that have the video on them.
- Also used "for cheap gags" (hey, the Doctor said it, not me) in "Smith and Jones"; when Martha first meets the Doctor, he stops in front of her on the street, takes off his tie, and walks off. When they meet at the hospital again, the Doctor can't ever recall meeting her. At the end of the episode, he goes back in time and takes his tie off in front of Martha in order to prove that the TARDIS is a time machine.
- Perhaps the most egregious is the possibly non-canonical special Time Crash, where the Fifth Doctor is brought forward in time and meets the Tenth. A problem develops which the Tenth Doctor instantly solves, working from his memory of when he was the Fifth Doctor in this very situation, watching his future self solve it.
- In the Third Doctor serial "Day of the Daleks", humans from the future attempt to blow up UNIT headquarters to prevent someone from bombing a ministerial-level conference to be held there, starting World War III and allowing the Daleks to invade. Predictably, their bomb is the bomb they are trying to prevent.
- The Fifth Doctor story "Earthshock" also is an example A ship is sent back in time and causes the extinction of the dinosaurs, the dominance of Homo sapiens and the creation of the ship. As an added bonus, it kills Adric.
- There's also "City of Death", in which an alien whose mind was split several ways across time after his space-ship landed on Earth and exploded. His past selves hid various treasures to be found by his future selves (including multiple copies of The Mona Lisa!), which were to be sold off and used to get the materials to create a time machine so he could go back and prevent the explosion - something The Doctor might have helped with had he not discovered that the same explosion was the "lightning bolt" that stirred up the primordial soup to begin creating life on Earth...
- In the Time Travel episode of Ghostwriter, the kids in 1928 solve their case by sending Ghostwriter to 1993 to find out how the case was solved, then bring the info back and use it to solve the case. As the kids in 1993 are reading old 1928 newspapers about the case, the pages start to turn blank — if they don't send the info back, the case will never be solved and thus the newspaper will never have it.
- Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Fischer only survived Judgement Day and taught the machines the things he did because he was in prison - thrown there due to his future self planting a backdoor into military computer systems, having logged in, of course, with his own retinal scan.
- Heroes: Anything to do with Hiro's adventures with Kensei.
- Averted at the end of the second season when Peter Petrelli allows Adam to almost release the virus he was attempting to destroy to prevent the end-of-the-world timeline.
- Referenced several times in Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations". In addition to the page quote, Bashir is hit upon by a woman who has the same name as his great-grandmother. After commenting on the fact that nobody knew his great-grandfather, he attempts to argue to O'Brien that he has to go sleep with her in order to ensure his own existence. O'Brien dully dismisses the notion, causing Bashir to declare that he can't wait to see the look on his face when he stops existing.
- Also happens in Past Tense where Sisko, Bashir and Dax are sent back into Earth's past and Sisko has to stand in for a civil rights leader (who died for the cause) in order to allow the Federation to exist. It is later noted how similar Sisko looks to the historical figure.
- In the premiere episode of Primeval, Nick Cutter discovers a human camp (and human bones) in the Permian, as well as a camera with a picture proving his vanished wife had been there. In the first season finale, having been reunited with his wife, they travel back to the Permian where Helen convinces him to take her picture...which he suddenly realizes is the picture he'd discovered previously, and that the camp they just set up is the one he'd discovered originally. An actual change does happen to the past, however, which confuses things.
- In the Stargate SG-1 episode '1969,' the team travels back to the title year and has to figure out how to get home, meeting a young General (then Lieutenant) Hammond, two hippies, and a young Catherine Langford. General Hammond sends a note back with them that Captain Carter is not allowed to read until after they go through the gate. The note contains cryptic instructions as to how to get home, as well as instructions from General Hammond to his younger self to help the visitors (that from his POV writing the note he has already helped). It is later revealed that General Hammond has been waiting for years for the sign that it is time to send the note (evidenced by a large cut on Captain Carter's hand).
- Star Trek Voyager. In "Time and Again" Voyager witnesses the destruction of a civlisation. When Janeway and Paris are accidentally sent back in time a few days before the incident, it turns out that the crews attempt to rescue them is what triggers the disaster. Fortunately Janeway stops the attempt and the timeline returns to normal.
Tabletop RPG
- Continuum is an RPG where the characters' entire goal is to make sure stable time loops work out.
- Planescape's Faction War features a double time loop. Considering that the person stuck in it tried to overthrow the Lady of Pain, he had it easy.
Radio
- The Doctor Who audio drama "Flip-Flop" takes this to a rather confusing extreme: Two time loops that feed each other. It's presented on two discs, a "White disc" and a "Black disc", and they can be listened to in either order, as each one follows a different timeline. To summarize: On both discs the Doctor and Mel arrive to find the planet Puxatornee on Christmas Eve just before midnight in a terrible way: On one disc, a radioactive wastlenad, on the other controlled by a hostile alien species. They are forced to go back in time to prevent it, and go back to Christmas Day to find the planet worse: On one disc, controlled by an alien species, and on the other a radioactive wasteland. They are then forced to go back to Christmas Eve before they arrived, and leave just before their other selves arrive on the planet, beginning the adventure on the other disc
Video Games
- In The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Link meets a man in the future who is angry that someone in the past used the Song of Storms to wreck his windmill. This teaches Link the Song of Storms, and he goes back in time to use it and wreck said windmill.
- Meanwhile, The Legend Of Zelda: Oracle of Ages has quite a few of them, such as defeating the Great Moblin in the present and receiving a Bomb Flower as a reward, then giving said Bomb Flower to the Gorons in the past, who use it to destroy the rocks that collapsed on the Goron Elder while also using its seeds to make it into the Goron's special crop.
- In Escape from Monkey Island, there is a puzzle in which you must navigate Guybrush Threepwood through a swamp with time-bending properties. About half way through, Guybrush meets his future self on the other side of a fence. The two of you have a conversation which ends in your future self giving you a few (apparently useful) items and going on his way. Later, when you're on the other side of the fence, you must recreate the conversation you had with your future self with your past self, give him the items your future self gave you, then go on your way. If you get it wrong, you cause a time paradox and have to start over.
- In Fate/Stay Night, the main character Emiya Shirou created the Reality Marble known as Unlimited Blade Works after seeing the Servant known as Archer use it. However, since Archer is Shirou in the future (or more accurately, a possible future self that he is capable of becoming), it means that in order to create the move in the past, he had to see it being used by his future self AFTER he had already created it, essentially meaning he created it BEFORE he created it, if that makes any sense at all. Of course, Archer comes from a plane of existence that time has no effect on, so at least the game TRIES not to make a paradox.
- It's actually said in the side material that he had it all along, and his magic is a side-effect of having it. He would have figured to use it eventually, since the future him that becomes Archer is implied to have experienced a set of events where he never used Unlimited Blade Works in his past self's presence.
- In Ever17, the main character (revealed to actually be a 4th-dimensional being known as "Blick Winkel") travels back in time from 2034 to 2017 to save two other characters from certain death, only to find that if he immediately reveals their survival to the others, that will create a time paradox preventing him from coming back in time in the first place—so instead he is forced to hide their existence and manipulate the others into setting up the event in 2034 that results in him being "summoned" in the first place.
- Even though the entire Prince Of Persia series is based on time travel, the example that stands out most is when the Prince continuously encounters a strange creature through his travels in Prince Of Persia: The Warrior Within. As it turns out, the strange creature is actually the Prince himself, transformed into "The Sand Wraith" after he found the mythical mask that could be used to change his fate, he then had to go back in time and meet his past self in all those locations. The kicker? The last time the two meet, instead of The Sand Wraith dying, which happened the first time you saw it, this time you kill your past self and resume the story in the same part as your past self, but you're really your future self. Get it?
- The first Fallout game has the Player Character trying to find water for their fallout shelter after its water chip is broken. It ends with the PC staying in the post-apocalyptic Earth and heading off to start a new life. The sequel has a random encounter in which the player, now controlling a descendant of the character in the first game, travels back in time to just before the first game and ends up in the shelter. The only way to return to your own time is to break the shelter's water chip...
- A stable time loop is essential to the plot of Final Fantasy VIII. Because the main party kills Ultimecia in a partially time-compressed realm, she is able to give her powers to Edea/Matron before she perishes. This is what makes Edea the perfect choice to possess for Ultimecia's plans, and causes the main conflict in the present that leads to the need to destroy Ultimecia. Additionally, after Edea inherits Ultimecia's powers in the past, Squall explains the concept of See D to her, thus inspiring the creation of the mercenary organization he grew up in and setting up his own role in the events of the game. The Stable Time Loop is further illustrated by the futile efforts at one of the cast members to Set Right What Once Went Wrong; she ultimately concludes that the past cannot be changed.
- It's more fun when you realize that, since Rinoa is presumably the last sorceress in the world and inherits Edea's powers, and that a sorceress can only become a true sorceress by inheriting power from a predecessor, Ultimecia would have had to receive her power from either Rinoa or a protege of Rinoa, and thus Ultimecia basically gave her own power to herself.
- Strangely enough, this trope is seen in the original Final Fantasy. The story begins when the Light Warriors are sent to the nearby Temple of Chaos to kill the renegade knight Garland. :As Garland is dying, the four Elemental Fiends of the game magically send him two thousand years into the past, when he becomes the demon Chaos, and sends the four Fiends to the still-the-past future to seize control of the four Elemental Orbs. The Fiends take roughly four hundred years to obtain all the Orbs and use them to wreck the world until the present day, when the Light Warriors fight Garland, slay the Fiends, and travel to the past to confront Chaos and die fighting him. The game ends when the Light Warriors kill Chaos and end the stable time loop. This troper did NOT expect such a complex plot for such a venerable game.
- Shadow Hearts: Covenant ends with the character Karin Koenig being sent back in time some 25 years as a result of her journeys with the main character, Yuri Hyuga. There, the first person she meets is Yuri's father, and it's strongly implied that she goes on to become Yuri's mother.
- And this begs the question of where Anne's Cross came from.
- In the good ending, Yuri kills himself, letting himself be impaled on a rock spire, to avoid having his soul destroyed by the Mistletoe's curse. With his last thought, he sends himself back to the beginning of the first game. As he waits for the train, there are hints that this time he will save Alice from what killed her the first time.
- Regarding that good ending, Yuri actually seems aware of the stable time loop ("Here comes that train again."), which raises questions of its own.
- Soul Nomad And The World Eaters features one of the most bizarre examples of this trope: During an early cutscene during a New Game Plus, possession of a certain item sends Gig and the main character 250 years back in time, to shortly after Lord Median killed the Master of Death, Vigilance (the previous incarnation of Gig). The pair of you destroy Median's armies and cause the Master of Life, Virtuous, to murder Median, causing the fall of Median's empire that is a part of your own timeline's backstory (and giving Virtuous the idea for fusing the main character and Gig 250 years in the future). When the main character later dies, his or her soul, as well as Gig's, is sent to Drazil, who causes the original creation of Gig from the newly deceased Vigilance. Drazil then turns the two of you into two of the world eaters that are subsequently sent back to Haephnes with the newly minted Gig to cause mass destruction — which are destroyed by the main character and Gig 250 years later during the game's main storyline. Thus, the alternate timeline version of you two not only set in motion the events of the main story and are inspirations for your own creation, but also become two of your own worst enemies, and get killed by yourselves. Whew.
- The Jak And Daxter series pulls a rather spectacular Stable Time Loop: At the end of the first game, Jak discovers a huge portal through time and space, which, when activated at the start of the second game, unleashes the Metal Head race into the world, and Jak & Daxter are immediately sent to the distant future. There Jak discovers that he was actually born in the future, and helps his younger self go back into the past to be raised safe from harm so that he can become his old self and defeat the Metal Head leader.
- The end of the second stage and the beginning of the eighth stage of Gradius V are both set in the same timeframe and same battleship, with the past and present versions of the Vic Viper running through segments of the stage alongside each other. The game records the actions of your 'past' version to replay in the second run-through.
- Time Splitters: Future Perfect had numerous examples of this. One of the earliest examples is also one of the most memorable - you are given a key by your future self that you need to progress, and later pass the key on to your past self, leaving its initial existence unexplained.
- Sam And Max Season 2 has the player create at least two stable time loops. The first involves taking a boxing glove from a character's present self and giving it to his past self - one would initially assume that the boxing glove is the same one from Season 1, but it can't be, since it turns out to be on an infinite loop. The other time loop involves traveling into the near future - so near as to be the next episode - and picking up an object, which causes the player character to be interrupted by someone calling from outside the window, asking for that object. The player character automatically tosses him the object, and receives another in return. In the next episode, the player character becomes the person outside the window, and must do what he remembers he did - an action that makes no sense without prior knowledge, even to the game's player.
- The Infocom Adventure Game Sorcerer features a Stable Time Loop. At one point, your future self appears and gives you the combination to a locked door, and demands your spell book. After you've unlocked the door, you have to travel back in time and give the combination to your past self, and get the spell book from him. (You can't carry anything with you when you go back in time.) The time travel spell is named "golmac" as a Shout Out to the "gold machine", the time machine in Zork III. It's fun to do silly things like screaming or singing when your future self appears, then watch how they're described when it's your past self doing them.
- Its sequel, Spellbreaker, features a two-in-one: you have to establish two Stable Time Loops in two different locations (with time limits on each), or else be wrung from existence by the ensuing paradox should you try to leave the hourglass. Early on in the game, you find a magic zipper that functions as your Bag of Holding; going back to that location in the past, you find a sack in its place, and have to swap the two (and all the contents thereof) before the rising water kills you. Elsewhere, there's a disused cell containing a moldy spellbook, entirely illegible save for one useful spell; when you return there in the past, you have to put your spellbook where you found the moldy one in the future (memorizing as many spells from it as you can first!) and leave the room precisely as it was (or will be) before the guards arrive.
- The DS game Time Hollow is rife with these, mostly because more than one person can adjust time.
- In all reality, The entire game is one BIG Time Loop which is both stable and constantly shifting. The overarcing plot is one huge Stable Time Loop due to the protagonist sending himself hints and clues at the end of the game to his startgame self but the events of both the past and present during certain periods is in constant flux, even though due to the looping nature, that flux is always in it's own stable loop.
- Near the beginning of Tomb Raider: Legend there is a flashback to Lara's childhood in which she set off an ancient device. Her mother then pushed Lara out of the way, looked into a ball of light and had a confused conversation with a mysterious figure (who the players can't see or hear) before disappearing. At the end of the game Lara inadvertently opens up a time portal and it is revealed that she was the person her mother was talking to at the start.
- In Vandal Hearts, the NPC Leena is sent back in time, and is then revealed to be the party member Eleni, who had Easy Amnesia until that point.
Web Comics
- This Questionable Content guest strip.
- In the Dominic Deegan, Oracle For Hire arc "The Storm of Souls", Dominic researches the creation and death of the first Acibek at the advice of Klo Tark, who met Dominic for the first time when he saw him several thousand years ago watching the death of Acibek.
- These happen so often in Bob And George that characters declaring "I hate time travel" became a Running Gag.
- In Wicked Powered, time travel incidents result in the protagonist being his own father AND his own mother.
- In Stickman And Cube, Cube purchases a time machine on eBay. The time machine then travels to the future by itself, and when it returns, Cube sends it back. Through time. To before they bought it. The guy who sold them the time machine finds it, and, having no other use for it, puts it on eBay...
- In probably one of the shortest and most succinct versions of the trope, Fuzzy of Sam and Fuzzy engages in a Stable Time Loop in this strip.
- At the time of writing this, the Space theme of Irregular Webcomic is stuck in one complex Stable Time Loop. The main reason for this is that the characters constantly revenge their own actions to themselves.
- This Starslip Crisis strip.
Western Animation
- In Futurama's episode "Roswell That Ends Well," Professor Farnsworth delivers a warning about temporal paradox:
Professor Farnsworth: You mustn't interfere with the past. Don't do anything that affects anything, unless it turns out you were supposed to do it. In which case, for the love of God, don't not do it!
- Fry then kills his grandfather Enos by mistake and impregnates his grandmother, thus becoming his own grandfather, with no ill side effects (it actually turns out to be advantageous to him later in the series). After that, Farnsworth gives up. The crew blasts up Roswell Air Force Base, steals some gear, rescues Zoidberg and Bender's body, and blasts off into space. Farnsworth then delivers one of the best lines ever: "Choke on that, causality!"
- Bender's Big Score takes the Stable Time Loop to ridiculous heights. Let's see: Among other things, Leela makes Fry jealous by falling deeply in love with a lab tech who, thanks to time travel, cryogenics, and the debilitating effects of a laser blast, is Fry. The secret to time travel is plucked from the very end of the movie (and Double Fry's buttocks) and grafted to Fry while he's still in a cryogenic state so that it can be found in the future, all so that reality doesn't fly apart. Yeah. It's quite something.
- The Game actually had entire plot, which was a giant Shoot The Shaggy Dog story about trying to prevent Mom from conquering the world by buying Planet Express, and dying while failing to do anything other than set up a seemingly random joke at the start.
- Time travel in Gargoyles (via the Phoenix Gate) can't be used to change the past, as Goliath found out in the first episode that introduced the artifact. The Avalon arc includes the flashback antagonist known as the Archmage in a classic bootstrap scenario: he travels back in time, saves himself from his canonical death at the bottom of a cliff, spends a day jumping through time to get his younger self up to speed on the plan, and then sets him off to repeat the process.
- An episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series has Kirk and Spock return from a trip to the past to find that the ship suddenly has a different science officer, and no one else knows who Spock is. Spock relates a memory from his childhood when his life was saved by an adult Vulcan, who he realizes looked exactly like he does now. So he has to take one more trip to the past to save himself and set things right.
- The Powerpuff Girls: Mojo Jojo goes back in time to try to kill The Professor as young boy to prevent him from creating the Powerpuff Girls. The girls follow and save The Professor, and it was this very incident that inspired him to get into science and try to create "the perfect little girl."
- The Fairly Oddparents full-episode special "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker": Timmy goes back in time to figure out why Crocker is so miserable. He discovers that Crocker had fairy godparents as a kid, and not just any random fairies, either—Cosmo and Wanda were his fairies. Since present-day Cosmo and Wanda had no memory of this, they quickly figure that Crocker had done something to lose his fairies. They then set out to try to stop this, but Timmy ends up being the one revealing Crocker's secret in public. Worse still, he leaves A.J.'s "Crocker-tracker" in the past, which Crocker managed to reconfigure with Cosmo's DNA, making it a much more effective "Fairy-Finder" than the one present-day Crocker previously had.
- ...which actually proves to be only a semi-stable time loop. If it were a true stable time loop, Crocker would have had AJ's tracker the entire time. Either that, or he 'forgot' that he had it until immediately after Timmy gets back from his time-travel.
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