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" Time travel is theoretically impossible, but I wouldn't want to give it up as a plot gimmick."
A time travel story can simply use time travel as a vehicle to get the hero to the Adventure Town, or the phlebotinum involved can be a key plot driver. No matter what story type the hero is going to need a Time Machine. Time Travel stories seem to fall into several categories:
- You Cant Fight Fate: Characters go to the future! They must get back to their own time and prevent the future from going horribly horribly wrong. Sometimes, they can't, in which case it's a Stable Time Loop (see below).
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Characters go to the past! Again, this is usually to "fix" the future- that is, the characters' "present." Often this involves correcting a Temporal Paradox. Remember, Hitler has Time Travel Exemption.
- Stable Time Loop: Characters go to the past! And in the past, they turn out to be responsible for the events that led to their "present." In other words, You Cant Fight Fate, but in the present rather than the future.
- Temporal Paradox: Now it gets complicated...
- Characters go to the past! In the past, they change history: If they do so by accident, it well may end the story with a Twilight Zone Twist; alternately, it will set the real plot in motion by requiring the characters to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. On the other hand, they may have set out to change history intentionally, so that the events that create their future/present — and, thus, the conditions that prompted them to go back in time — never happened, basically the same set up as above, but without the initial "accident."
- Characters go to the future! Upon returning to the past, they are able to fight fate and prevent the events of the future (seeing which prompted them to try to prevent the events of the future in the first place) from occurring.
- Reset Button: The characters go through a world of crap, or somebody "changes history", and they resort to time travel to fix it. If they succeed, the time-line fixes itself and the characters awaken having no knowledge that anything was ever different. Occasionally, only the time-travellers remember — at least, the ones who were alive at the point of fix. If they don't succeed, the series has just received a Re Tool.
- Connecticut Yankee: The characters are stuck in another time with no way of return and must choose between quietly living out their lives without changing history or working to change the world to their (and the natives') benefit. You'd be amazed how few people seem to pick the first option.
- Alternate Universe: The characters time-travel has split their universe in twain. There's the universe they're in and the universe they're not in.
No matter what the variation, if there's a scientist or scholar in the group, he'll be giving warnings about the Temporal Paradox risk. And every trip risks encounter with the Butterfly Of Doom or with accidentally leaving behind Grays Sports Almanac.
Time Travel stories that are prone to phlebotinum rules
Anime and Manga
- In Simoun, time travel requires the successful completion of the Emerald Ri Maajon, an extremely dangerous maneuver that can only be accomplished by a pair of the most skillful pilots with a powerful emotional bond with each other. Failed attempts are generally fatal, with explosive consequences.
Film
- In "Donnie Darko" people in the future will be able to mess with the past without leaving the future via machine. Such meddling causes alternate universes which need destroyed or they'll erase the future-people's universe.
- In Back To The Future, you needed a way to generate 1.21
gigajiggawatts of power, such as nuclear fuel or a lightning strike, and a ground speed of 88 miles per hour.
- In the Terminator series, only organic things could be sent through time. No weapons or clothes or anything but the time traveller.
- Rather conveniently forgotten by T2. The only thing that allowed the original T-101 back through time was the fact it was a shell surrounded by living tissue. It was, to quote Kyle Reese, "something about the field generated by a living organism'. Nothing dead will go." Therefore how exactly the T-1000 which was liquid metal managed to travel through is just, well, kinda unexplained.
- This troper just assumed that he did have a organic shell, only it got burned up in the wreckage of the crashed truck. Hence why he doesn't use his liquid abilities until after that.
- In Jean Claude Van Dam's Timecop, there's a federal agency responsible for going after people who attempt to go back in time. He winds up having to go back in time himself to save his wife from dying, which is what he was hired to keep other people from doing.
- Star Trek 4, 7, 8 and 11 all use time travel as a device, by a different method each time.
- This website lists almost every single Time Travel movie ever made, from 1921's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court up to 2009's Star Trek. http://cvil.wustl.edu/~gary/SF/time-movies.html
Live Action Television
- In Seven Days, the hero was the only one who could work the device reliably, and he could only go back seven days at a time.
- In Time Trax, the method varied, but the rules were that you could only travel between two set time periods (The Present and The Future), and more than two trips in a lifetime are lethal.
- In the original Star Trek, time travel required either a dangerous and complicated slingshot maneuver or a precision jump into the Donut of Forever, but these days Trek characters can travel through time by spilling coffee on their tricorder. (Which is probably why Star Fleet now has a department of time travel cops staffed entirely by grim-jawed MIBs, as seen in DS9.)
Tabletop Games
- In the Role Playing Game Feng Shui, a region of cross-time 'space' called the Netherworld allows characters to move between four different points in history (69 AD, 1850 AD, 1996 AD and 2056 AD). These junctures are fixed with relation to each other, treating the start of the campaign as zero-hour for all of them. So, if you enter the Netherworld in 1996, travel back to 69 AD, stay for six months and then return to '96, it will be six months later there, as well. A second use of phlebotinum states that only people who control powerful feng shui sites can actually change the future by changing the past; everyone else just sees history work itself around the change.
Western Animation
- In Time Squad the characters have to constantly go back in time in order to stop goofups in the timeline (because time is like a rope and as it grows it becomes frayed). Hilarity Ensues when they encounter historical figures doing crazy things, such as Eli Whitney creating flesh-eating robots instead of the cotton gin, Ludwig von Beethoven becoming a wrestler instead of a composer, or George Bush thinking that the answer to all of the country's problems is a giant ball of twine.
Series that featured time travel in a major way:
Anime and Manga
- Soukou No Strain used the theory of general relativity to drive the plot. Sara's own motivations to become a Reasoner are to meet up with her brother, because if he returns from military service in space after a couple of years in his time, she'll be long dead in hers. Ralph's motivations are explained by his being able to go back hundreds of years using the same theory.
- Zipang, where a JMSDF destroyer somehow ends up at the Battle of Midway. It's actually much more interesting that it sounds.
- Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle later turns out to have used this, having hidden it among a bushel of jaunts to alternate universes, or "countries". One "country" turned out to be the main characters' homeland in the past. And our world, or one much like it, in the future.
- Pokémon 4Ever features a Celebi that inadvertently brings the young Professor Oak with it to the present day when escaping from a hunter.
Comics
Film
Literature
- The Time Machine inspired 99% of the modern uses of the concept. The book used it to provide a present day frame story for a tour of the future.
- Time And Again and its sequel Time After Time by Jack Finney.
- Dragonriders Of Pern: The earlier books used the newly-(re)discovered time-traveling ability of the dragons for several plot points. After the Big One (Lessa bringing the lost Weyrs back thorugh time with her) time travel was relegated to a Save The Day plot device.
- The Suzumiya Haruhi stories feature time travelers, most notably Mikuru. It gets important in a major way in the novels, which also push Mikuru from being the Neutral Female somewhat. They travel to 3 years ago, and holy shit! Kyon is the goddamn
Batman John Smith! The 7th novel also circles around it, this time from the future.
- For everyone who has questions, I present you this◊. If it even helps. Careful of spoilers.
- A Tale Of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones. Time City is "outside" normal time, using recycled time (hence very important/emotional moments get burned in and are seen as time ghosts both before and after the event). Time is divided into unstable eras to be visited with great caution (ours obviously) and stable eras that they trade information with. However, they only sell information about the (relative) past, no stock market sneak previews.
Live Action Television
- Doctor Who is normally a variant of Adventure Towns, as the Doctor firmly believes that the timeline should not be altered, although some stories are concerned with the Doctor trying to prevent somebody else from changing the timeline.
- Though this only seems to apply when the audience know what history "should" be. The Doctor won't save Pompeii from burning or steer the Titanic clear of the iceberg, but will happily stop a volcano erupting on the planet Tharg or a spaceship hitting an asteroid and exploding. The question "but what if the volcano on Tharg is *supposed* to erupt and kill everyone" is never asked. Bellisarios Maxim may apply here.
- The Doctor knows an awful lot of stuff - this could be justified, as he possibly knows the history of Tharg, and recalls that the volcano does not erupt in his known history. Also, in the Pompeii episode, he says that some events are "fixed", while others are "in flux", and he can identify the difference, thanks to Time Lord superpowers. He explains that he can't change fixed events, and then goes on to make Vesuvius erupt himself, it being the only way to defeat an alien menace living inside Vesuvius, which would otherwise take over the entire planet. Hmm.
- Plus they answered the question "What if the Doctor did change history?" In the Waters of Mars. It just triggered the end of time.
- In fact, Doctor Who has generally been somewhat shy of actually using Time Travel as part of the plot, rather than merely a way of delivering the characters to the Adventure Town of the week.
- Quantum Leap
- Star Trek Enterprise: One of its central premises was a "temporal cold war", in which bandits are going back in time and messing with the timeline. The rules and limitations of time travel are never explained to anyone at any time, so the writers had a license to Ass Pull.
- The Time Tunnel.
- Voyagers - this was the entire premise. The 'Voyagers' were charged to Set Right What Once Went Wrong - they used one gadget, the Omni (which looked rather like a large gold pocketwatch), both to travel and to figure out what was wrong and how to set it right.
- Kamen Rider Kabuto heavily featured a Worm ability called 'Clock-Up' (reproduced artificially by the Zecters used by the Riders) which allowed the user to warp the flow of time and dramatically increase their speed. Later, Tendou gained the ability of Hyper Clock-Up, which allowed him to turn back time when the plot demanded, but with the occasional habit of throwing him into nearby sub-dimensions. Later still, one Worm could actually freeze time, strongly enough to even beat Hyper Clock-Up.
- Kamen Rider Den-O features a superhero that travels back through time on a passenger train, DenLiner. Fairly early on, it is established that he is a "singularity point" a person who is completely immune to changes in the time stream and thus especially qualified to battle time-traveling Monsters of the Week. Why the OTHER singularity point handy, Hana, doesn't do the job remains unexplained.
- Because she's a girl.
- While that may be the real reason, there is another explanation given on the show. In order to fight she'd have to agree to let herself be possessed by one or more of the Monsters of the Week in a symbiotic relationship and she hates them too much to agree to that.
- Heroes has the character Hiro, his time travelling basically set off the whole first series in an attempt to change the future, it's a lot harder than you imagine, apparently. Also in the second series he travels back in time and creates the character he heard in his bedtime stories. Peter also is prone to time travel but less often.
- As the title indicates, Power Rangers Time Force features this; it's about a Time Police squad from the year 3000 who have chased a prisonful of escaped inmates to 2001.
- Lost from season 3 on, but especially in season 5. In Lost time travel nothing can be changed and everything is one huge Stable Time Loop. Note that the first person who claimed that time could be changed was fatally shot by his own mother before he was born once he actually tried to.
- And to add insult to injury, this is what had "always" happened.
- Actually, most of the people who time traveled back to the 70s were prepared for option 6, at least until Locke came back. This lasted three years.
Video Games
- In Oblivion a book tells the story of a famous battle in which magical time-altering storms were coming on an area and a local nation which knew their workings used them to deploy troops favorably. So they got hours of killing in where their soldiers outnumbered the enemy, had men in place to sack castles when hours turned to days, etc.
- Final Fantasy XI uses this in Wings of The Goddess to travel 20 years ago to the Crystal War, one of the largest wars in Vana'deil's history.
- Chrono Trigger.
- Tales Of Phantasia.
- The central plot of The Journeyman Project trilogy hinges on time travel, due to the existence of a government agency specifically created to prevent the alteration of history.
- Dark Cloud 2 (a.k.a. Dark Chronicle), both with objects the main characters carried and a flying, time travelling Cool Train that seems awfully familiar.
- Super Robot Wars Reversal has this as the main plot, the main characters got sent off to the past due to the encounter with the Big Bad and had to decide whether to let the future stay stable, or change it by modifying the past (they picked the second).
- The Ecco The Dolphin series is all about time travel. The second game's plot even centres around the time travelling in the first game screwing up the time stream.
- Legacyof Kain
- The driving force behind the plot of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2 is that the god of time is slowly losing his marbles, and time is screwing up royally as a result.
- Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Kato's entire plan hinges on going back in time 100 years to eliminate certain individuals. When the plan is ultimately foiled, everyone gets to pick a time to travel to to live happily ever after. Karin ends up going back in time, meeting Yuri's dad and becoming his mum. So...yeah.
- Prince of Persia. The Sands of Time trilogy features 6-10 seconds of time travel as the primary gameplay gimmick, to awesome effect. The entire point of the second game is to Set Right What Once Went Wrong thus pushing your character's Reset Button. There's even a Crowning Moment of Awesome in the third game wherein the titular prince decides not to use the reset button again and man up to his mistakes.
Web Comics
- Earthsong features a particularly head-spinning variant that doesn't actually CHANGE TIME AT ALL.
- Dresden Codak has a major plot arch which revolves around time travelers from the future entering and later invading the present.
Western Animation
Some series that occasionally called on the trope:
Anime and Manga
- Time travel is specifically taboo in the Sailor Moon universe, and it's the job of Sailor Pluto to guard the gate of time and make sure no one uses it. That said, The sailor scouts (Chibi-usa especially) make occasional trips between the 20th and 30th centuries.
- The Android Saga from Dragon Ball Z is kicked off by the arrival of Trunks, a Future Badass who owns both Frieza and King Cold when they come to Earth to seek revenge on Goku before revealing himself to be the son of Vegeta and Bulma. He's traveled back in time because the future he came from is a Bad Future where human civilization has been destroyed by the Androids and he wants to prevent that future from coming to pass by making sure that Goku doesn't die from the heart disease that he picked up on Planet Yadrat. He's only half successful because while Goku does survive the heart disease, he's out of action for the good part of the saga, leaving Trunks and the rest of the Z team to battle the Androids.
Literature
- The Futurama bit (below) is very similar to a bit in the The Restaurant at the End of the Universe where Marvin the Paranoid Android is abandoned for most of the lifespan of the universe due to time travel. “The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.” It is later stated that, due to his various time travel incidents, Marvin is several times older than the Universe itself.
- The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy explains that there can't be any temporal paradoxes, because "all the important changes have already been made."
- On the other hand it also mentions that because of impatient building contractors with time machines, the great Cathedral of Chalesm was replaced by another building before it was ever built.
- Thus making any pictures of it very, very valuable.
- And blank.
Live Action Television
- Lois And Clark had a few time travel episodes that included Time Machine author H. G. Wells.
- Charmed had a central character who was from The Horrible Future.
- Stargate SG-1 had several episodes involving time travel—"1969" when they travel back to said year due to Stargate mishaps, Groundhog Day Loop episode "Window of Opportunity", "2010" showing a possible future where everyone is sterilized, "It's Good To Be King" with prophecies from the Ancient time-travelling puddle jumper, season-8 finale "Moebius" involving the same jumper and a twisted Time Loop (to be expected given the name), and season 10 Grand Finale "Unending".
- In season 2 of Roswell, Max travels back in time after everyone but he and Liz dies, in order to persuade past-Liz to break up with past-Max and make him get together with Tess. It's very silly and involves mariachis.
- Power Rangers occasionally calls on this, even outside the Time Force season.
- BabylonFive called upon time travel in a few key episodes.
- Lost hinted mildly at time disparity in season 2, flirted with time travel in season 3, and took the full plunge by the end of season 4.
- Nick Arcade had a Time Travel board where the player (Mikey) moves between the past and the future of his own neighborhood.
Video Games
- In Fallout 2 there is a random encounter, which sends you back to the prequels vault 13, where you break the water chip. Thus making you responsible for the events at the beginning of Fallout 1.
- One of the missions in Osu Tatakae Ouendan involves being called by Cleopatra in Ancient Egypt to cheer on her helping her workers to build a Pyramid in 10 days so she can use its magic to get more beautiful and greet her lover Marc Antony properly.
- Likewise, in Elite Beat Agents, one of the missions involve travelling back in time (by purpose) to Florence in the 15th Century, to help Leonardo Da Vinci win the heart of Mona Lisa and eventually create his masterpiece of painting.
- One part of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney's fourth case involves using the "MASON system" to investigate witnesses and crime scenes from seven years ago and the present day. The player must go into scenes from the future, obtain evidence there, then go back and present that evidence. This part of the game is particularly controversial amongst fans of the series; spirit channeling and a courtroom where lawyers shout at each other, whip witnesses, and drink 17 cups of coffee is one thing, time travel is another.
- It's meant to be some kind of 'game' or simulation. Or something. No-one really knows.
- Considering that Phoenix himself tells the player to 'think of it as a game' and that he's the 'guide' in the game, it's most likely a simulation of his memories.
- Three Legend Of Zelda games use it as a major game mechanic: Ocarina Of Time has Link travel back and forth seven years, and Majoras Mask has him travel through a Groundhog Day Loop, and Oracle Of Ages has him use a harp to travel 400 years in the past. The mechanics aren't exactly consistent. Time travel in Ocarinaof Time causes a timeline split but the others apparently operate on a Stable Time Loop system.
- Majora's Mask uses the Split Timeline theory too, only, all the other timelines are destroyed as a result of a Colony Drop (the game also, officially, takes place in a different universe).
- Ultima II: The main part of the game involves travelling between five time periods, Legends (no time), Pangea (9,000,000 BC), 1423 BC, 1990 AD, the Aftermath (2112 AD)
Web Comics
- The current mega-arc of Irregular Webcomic has massive time travellings done by many many characters in many many themes. This might be a Xanatos Gambit on the part of the author to resurrect himself and Screw Destiny after he got killed by himself in the future and becomes Death of Going Back in Time And Killing Yourself and is suppose to go back and kill himself to continue the Stable Time Loop. Also, Leonardo da Vinci is a time traveller, is British, and made deals with Deaths. Did I mention that TARDIS also exist, and being used by the pirates and British navy crews (the latter owns it (?)), with the theme sets in 18th century? Yeah, it's that weird.
- The arc seems to have come to a conclusion on December 31st, 2008, with a character in the Sci-Fi theme shooting the last time machine available, breaking the Stable Time Loop and blowing up the universe. Zod only knows what happens next.
- In Genius: The Transgression, time travel is possible, but it's almost never a good idea. There's an entire section devoted to time travel and results thereof.
- The Adventures Of Doctor Mc Ninja. Time-traveling Thomas Jefferson. [[ I don't really need to say it.]]
Western Animation
- In "A Sitch in Time", a three part episode of Kim Possible, all three of the above plots are used. In the end, it turns out that time travel had been responsible for even the initial complication that got the plot rolling (Kim's sidekick moving to Norway) but all was undone by the end.
- In Futurama, the crew of the Planet Express Ship gets sent back in time to 1947 Earth, and becomes the crashed alien spacecraft at Roswell, New Mexico. Fry does "the nasty in the pasty" and becomes his own grandfather, and Bender's head ends up buried in the desert for 1053 years, in a parody of the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Time's Arrow". ("What was it like being stuck in that hole for a thousand years?" "I was enjoying it - until you guys showed up!")
- The Venture Bros parodied this in Escape to the House of Mummies, Part 2 (there was no part 1), where the situation became increasingly ridiculous as they traveled around time, leading to Caligula, Freud, Edgar Allen Poe, and two Brocks launching an assault.
- Darkwing Duck had three (that I know of) time travel stories.
- 'Paraducks: Darkwing goes to the past, tries to avoid Temporal Paradox when Genre Savvy daughter Gosalyn keeps reminding him of it. Turns out instead he broke a Stable Time Loop. Oops.
- 'Time and Punishment': Gosalyn is flung to future, which turns into a hellhole due to..her going missing in the present.
- 'Quack of Ages': straight-up Reset Button-type adventure.
- Gargoyles had a magic item called The Phoenix Gate that could be used for time travel. Trouble was, it couldn't be used to change the past. Fate would simply conspire against anyone who tried to.
Special Mention Goes To:
Mentioned in the end, since this series uses (and spoofs) every single trope listed above:
- Larry Niven's series of time travel short stories, collected in Flight of The Horse - where time travel is impossible in the real world, and every excursion that the protagonist makes is into a parallel, fantasy world that then directly affects his own. The reason for the jaunts? Well, the Secretary General of the UN in the series is a little mentally retarded, and the protagonist is sent back in time to recover animals that the SG has seen in recovered children's books. You see, they don't exist in the heavily polluted future...to the extent that, in one story where the proliferation of cars did not take place due to time meddling, one of the supporting characters has to breathe exhaust fumes from a internal-combustion car to stay alive. As is the case with most of Niven's work - it's all scientifically justifiable using the science known at the time of authorship.
- Done a few times in Lilo and Stitch: The Series. Special mention goes to two particular episodes.
- In "Melty", Lilo makes a fool of herself in front of her love interest, Keoni, and uses Jumba's time machine to go back to the past and change it. However, a side effect of the machine is that something (in a classic Ray Bradbury Butterfly effect) changes in each time line (which usually goes horribly bad). In the end, Lilo learnes a valuable WTF lesson of literally not dwelling into the past.
- In "Skip", Lilo and Stitch capture an experiment that is able to travel ten years into the future. In the first ten year travel, a seventeen (and shall I say HOT!) Lilo finds out that she has missed out on seven years of her life. When she goes another ten years in the future, everyting is hell. The villain Hamsterviel has taken over the island and the planet, captured all the experiments, and has become king of the galactic federation. Lilo decides that she can't force herself to grow up too early and conventiantly sets the reset button on the experiment to go back to the present time. My personal opinion to this episode is: Why didn't Lilo and Stitch starve to death when all that time went by?
See also Meanwhile In The Future, What Year Is This and this Wikipedia entry.
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