Timey Wimey Ball - Television Tropes & Idioms

Mahou Sensei Negima: Time travel watches pop up during the Mahora Festival arcs, creating Stable Time Loops, multiple copies of Negi running into each other, a Set Right What Once Went Wrong or two, and some Rule Of Cool duels that exploit the effects of short-range Time Travel.
Suzumiya Haruhi. Stable Time Loops are a matter of course for much of the novels when Mikuru is involved (she is her own boss, and I don't mean that in an empowerment way). The three-years-ago loop in particular gets even loopier as the series goes on. But the late novels introduce a rival timeline. They must be here for something. There's also the great mess in the fourth novel, which may have something to add to this.
- It is consistent, Nagaru Tanigawa just likes to make things more complex than the casual reader is going to bother with.
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle: Feather. Reservoir. The fucking up of the entire time-space continuum. Time travel duplicates. Clones? Parents? Putting what is confusing about the time travel involved into words is, in itself, extremely confusing.
Natsu No Arashi! enjoys playing foosball with its Timey-Wimey Ball as characters jump back and forth across the hours, leading to a series of Stable Time Loops.

Close Anime and Manga

The Marvel Universe in general. Trying to work out the relationships between various timelines is an easy way to give yourself a headache.
- Actually, Marvel Universe Time Travel is pretty easy thanks to one rule: any changes made to the past result in an alternate timeline. The tricky part is that sometimes, interactions between two such changed timelines create yet another timeline.
In the 1980s Marvel Transformers comic, one can alter the past to suit the present. However, there is also the possibility that one travels to a different universe that is simply the same as your own. So thus, any attempt to travel back in time to, say, build a giant cannon to destroy the dark god who created you when he turns his attention to Earth in order to free yourself from his control as Galvatron tried to, can potentially end in failure as it is not your own universe. As it turned out, it WAS Galvatron's own universe.
The DCU has all sorts of fun here, especially when Booster Gold is involved, but it's been proven time and again that trying to Screw Destiny usually ends badly. Aside from that, the Timey Wimey Ball hurts Booster's head as much as it hurts ours.

Close Comic Books

The whole messy issue of Time Travel's lampshaded in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me when, after Austin starts to get bewildered by all the possible paradoxes his traveling into The Sixties involves, Basil jumps in with "I suggest you don't worry about that sort of thing and just enjoy yourself", and then turns pointedly toward the camera and remarks "and that goes for you all as well". Much self-contradictory timey-wimeyness ensues since, as Mike Myers puts it in his DVD comments, "our theory of time travel is that time travel works however we need it to work for each particular scene's joke."
Back To The Future has different things happening to the hero as his past is changed. In the first movie, he was slowly being erased, due to preventing his parents from conceiving him. In the second, he was born, but his father was killed and he had supposedly been sent to Switzerland, except none of this affected the time-travelling version of himself. Likewise, Future-Biff went back to the past to change time, but then came back to the unchanged future to leave the time machine for Marty and the Doc (a deleted scene shows that he immediately gets erased afterwards, in a much faster fashion than Marty). When they get to the changed past, they can't get back, because it would be the changed future.
- Some of it can be sorted out if you assume that the time machine creates a sort of "safe bubble" of unaltered time for whoever has traveled in it, thus why Marty and Doc don't display knowledge of things that their past selves would know at various times. And if continuity has more difficulty asserting itself in the past than in the future, the different speeds make more sense; Marty's disappearing slower because the universe is having a more difficult time noticing that something is out of place in time gone by, but Biff disappears quickly because in the future, all the new timeline has to do is reassert itself. Like just picking up a candy bar wrapper that fell on the floor as opposed to trying to get all the dustbunnies out from under the couch.
  - Let's also not forget that the first movie suggests a Stable Time Loop since Marty's performance of Johnnie B. Goode apparently inspired its creation, though perhaps Chuck Berry would have written it anyway...
- There is a bigger issue at hand: why was future Biff able to return to his own present, a "future" that would have been negated by his very actions in the past, after giving his younger self the Almanac? and yet that was a problem for Marty and Doc when they returned to 1985 and found it changed?
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure establishes that "the clock is always running in San Dimas" — that is, that however long Bill and Ted are in another time, that much time will have passed when they return to their "home time". This is held up for the first film and most of the second... and then utterly discarded for the ending of Bogus Journey, where they zap away for 18 months and return seconds after they left. Of course, the first film kludges it a bit as well — when initially going back to their own time, they actually end up at the same point they left, and have to be told by Rufus that they need to dial 1 digit higher for the next day.
- It is implied that they took advantage of the booth at the end of the first movie, to judge by their sweet setup for their final report. They needed time to set that up. My guess is Rufus made up a time rule to keep them focused.
- Who's to say they didn't jump into the phone booth head forward 18 months and carry on with their lives in the future. Which would be their present. Which is still actually a future's past. Or something. I hate time travel.
- Even more odd, Rufus never tells the two of them his name. They hear it from their future selves, who presumably heard it from their future selves who...
The Butterfly Effect has the events of roughly half of Evan's blackouts caused by his older self going back to them, while the other half were normal initially, but could be changed by his older self. One blackout even has examples of both. Also, it is established early on that Evan is the only who has any memory of the old timelines, but at one point another character notices a change in the timeline for no apparent reason.
Deja Vu starts out well enough, but implies that the detective has already gone back in time and failed. What's more, the ending finishes without a Stable Time Loop of any kind, so either the changes made will reset or they've created one alternate timeline where everything is hunky dory and one where everyone's dead.
In Femme Fatale... y'know what, screw it. You watch it and tell me what the hell that movie was about. Was it Time Travel? Or Was It A Dream?
Frequency is one big Timey Wimey Ball. You've got the son talking to the dad on the same ham radio, and even the whole "changes happen in sync with each other deal" mentioned in the Kamen Rider Den O note above.
The Lake House was a horrible mixture of Time Travel ideologies. In some ways the timeline is constant - the guy she kissed at the party turns out to be the guy she's communicating with in the past. Yet in other ways the timeline is variable - she tells him how she misses the trees, so he plants one at the place she's going to live at - which she magically doesn't notice having grown until after she sent him that letter. And then there's the grandfather paradox involving the (lack of a) car accident at the end/beginning of the film, causing her to go/not go to the lake house and end up communicating/not communicating with the guy in the first place.
The movie Lost in Space contains a plot where the father walks into the future by an energy field just to find his son creating that energy field as a result to build a machine to travel into the past, because the entire family was wiped out as a result of the father disappearing by walking into the future...
The Time Travel in Meet The Robinsons. At first it is altered by the fact that Doris went back in time and turned to the future into a apocalyptic Bad Future where everybody is under the control of bowler hats. Lewis goes back in time and alters it, by announcing to Doris that he will never invent her, killing her in the process so she doesn't get the chance to launch her plan. By the end of it all, it may or may not be a Stable Time Loop. A couple coincidences happen at the very end, he meets his future adoptive parents, he says the name they give him, and he meets his future wife. However, it might be that his parents would've given him that name anyway, and he might've ended up falling in love with the frog woman regardless of the fact he might know he marries her in the future. Also, his memory machine would've worked the first time around if the Bowler Hat Guy hadn't sabotaged it. So, it's open to interpretation, most people would choose the one that makes sense, but some don't, for some reason.
- Observant viewers will also note that no one mentions that the time machine stolen by Bowler Hat Guy was left behind in the present.
Each Terminator movie uses a different theory of Time Travel, though it's at least consistent within each movie.
- Though one persistent law of Time Travel is that things can only Time Travel is they are made of meat (so people, but not the organic fibers of clothing), wrapped in meat (i.e., Cyborg Terminators), can do a reasonably good imitation of meat (i.e., "Liquid Metal" Terminators) or sneak in when nobody's looking (Cromartie's head). Which is to say, the mechanism here appears to be exactly analogous to airport security. The jury still is out on what would happen if you tried to bring a Ham and Fusion Grenade Sandwich with you.
- This actually gets answered in the comic book continuity. A group of skinned-up Terminators gets sent back, one of whom is extremely fat because he's literally a meat bag. Full of guns. Which the others have to "kill" to open.
In The Film Of The Book The Time Machine (2002), the Time Traveler discovers that he cannot change the past since it would create a Temporal Paradox. Then he goes even further into the future only to see the Morlocks victorious over the Eloi and afterward returns to the year 802701 to successfully defeat the Morlocks.
James P Hogan had a solution in Thrice Upon a Time. The prospective time traveller induces a grandfather paradox. The universe doesn't abhor it or disallow it or anything, but simply plays out the umpteen zillion iterations of the events in question. A leads to B leads to Not-A leads to Not-B leads to A leads to B... It should go on forever, but on each runthrough, quantum randomness causes things to be very, very slightly different (an atom decays or not, a pair of colliding air particle zig instead of zag) totally regardless of anything the time traveller does. Normally they won't make any difference whatsoever, but after a few million or trillion iterations, the randomness happens to align in such a way that it breaks the paradox (i.e., kills his wife in a new way) and lets the timeline continue past it. What we the audience see is merely the "final cut" version of history, the one that didn't get stuck in an endless loop.
Ben10 Race Against Time includes a bit of this. Eon seeks to use the Hands Of Armageddon to bring his dying race to Earth to repopulate, but traveling through time so much has weakened him to the point where he's unable to use the Hands. His plan is to use the Omnitrix to turn Ben into himself (a second Eon), so that he can activate the device and end the reign of humans on Earth. The movie is pretty vague about how it works, but at first glance, it seems as though Eon may actually be Ben, corrupted by himself in his own past.
- On top of that, when Eon succeeds in implanting himself in the Omnitrix, he declares that "two cannot exist at once", dissappearing into a different point in the time stream.

Close Film

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories are historically well-researched and confusing as hell. Among other things, the future is "uptime" and the past is "downtime," which makes it sound counterintuitively like time is a river that flows uphill.
Same thing in The End of Eternity, where use words like "downwhen", "upwhen", "anywhen" and "everywhen".
Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox does not actually feature any paradoxes. The prequel on the other hand... Specifically, an island was magically removed from normal time for 10,000 years, but the magic is breaking up and time starts running alternately forward and backward at varying speeds. Holly dies, but Artemis fires a shot backwards in time thus killing the demon who killed her and bringing her back to life. Furthermore, Artemis goes back in time and causes a mosaic of himself to be created hundreds of years in the past, a fact which is only noticed in the present day after he gets back.
- He questions the first paradox, but eventually gives up trying to figure it out.
A certain short story by Philip K Dick - Interloper, if memory serves - apparently contains a truly brain-breaking form of time travel in which a satellite is placed in orbit to send images from the future to the present. The images are of the future that is brought about by the decisions people make in the present after seeing the pictures, which eventually brings about The End Of The World As We Know It when they send a guy forward to a future they see devoid of animal life so that he can figure out how it happened. He winds up bringing back horrible fast-reproducing, stinging, poisonous butterflies that go on to kill everyone and become the new dominant species. One can only hope they figured it out and looked at the future again to figure out a way to kill the things.
The Book of All Hours duology by Hal Duncan doesn't even try to claim to be otherwise. It's such a mishmash of pocket universes, alternate universes, and paradox that causality can't even be seen with a telescope on a good day. Essentially: think of the universe as a huge piece of vellum on which reality has been written. Then crumple it up. Most characters make such a habit of going not just back and forth in time but sideways that one goes back to the day where he, as a child, met his elder self, and that elder self committed suicide... only now, as the elder self, shoots his younger self instead. Nothing happens to the elder.
In Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels, not only do the rules of Time Travel make no sense whatsoever, the main character (whose father is a time-traveller) realises this, and often lampshades it. In one book, the rules actually seem to change over the course of a conversation with her dad, but she realises there's no point in even asking.
- In First Among Sequels, there is a subplot revolving around the fact that the time-travellers have mapped almost the entire future and found that Time Travel has not yet been invented. By the end of the book, Thursday and co. have managed to ensure that Time Travel is never invented, and thus, could never have been used earlier in the series. This means that several events from the previous four books including the plays of William Shakespeare and the beginning of all life on earth logically could not have happened. Since many of these events were the results of Stable Time Loops anyway, this is a case of Ascended Time Paradox. Or Mind Screw turned Up To Eleven. Either way, it's probably best just to apply the MST 3 K Mantra and enjoy the series.
David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself features a time-travel belt, which has the traveller completely paranoid about the possibility of a Temporal Paradox destroying him. It turns out that Temporal Paradoxes are impossible; Time Travel rewrites history except for the guy who travelled through time. Various Mind Screw moments: the protagonist has orgies with himself of different ages, writes himself out of history, has a family with himself as a female, eventually has that written out of history (but his son still exists) and culminates in finally giving himself (as the son, so he's his own father) the time travel device. On the last, the idea of where it came from is explored a couple of times and eventually it's hit upon that it's impossible to know where it came from, the creators must have been written out of history. Oh, and he kills Jesus at an early age. It's okay, he goes back and stops himself after finding out how much it screws with history.
Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World features two overlapping timelines and a loop. The lead character travels successively further backwards in time, each time encountering the villains who are travelling in the opposite direction, so the first time he meets them, they know him and all his tricks, and they defeat him easily. The last time he meets them, they have no idea who he is, but he knows all about them. There's an additional twist where he gets rescued by a mysterious time machine appearing, and ends up sending the same time machine he was rescued by back in time to rescue himself. Where did the time machine come from? It's stuck in a loop.
In A Tale Of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones, the titular city exists outside of the flow of history on the rest of the world. From this vantage point, the citizens see that history works like weather patterns — it shifts back and forth with minute details thanks to the butterfly effect and time loops. Basically, a more detailed explanation of the Timey Wimey Ball, where shifts in the time travel theories are explained away as the changing "weather patterns" of time. For instance, on one day in Time City the inhabitants may observe that World War II begins in 1939, but on another day they may notice that it has changed to 1938. Perhaps time in the book is two-dimensional, with Time City time orthogonal to time everywhere else. Except it turns out that the history of Time City can shift back and forth too...
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, the History Monks are originally presented in Small Gods as ensuring everything happens the way it's supposed to (although, even then, the monk Lu-Tze decides to Screw Destiny). In Thief of Time, it's revealed that, following various alterations to the Disc's temporal dimensions, the "true history" barely exists, and their main job is to prevent the Timey Wimey Ball from imploding. And in Night Watch, when Vimes travels thirty years into the past to become his own mentor, even the monks aren't sure what's happening.
Lu-Tze: For a perfectly logical chain of reasons, Vimes ended back in time even looking rather like Keel! Eyepatch and scar! Is that Narrative Causality, or Historical Imperative, or Just Plain Weird?

Close Literature

Black Hole High: "Fate": When Vaughn, having traveled back in time to meet his mother, steals her hairclip as a memento, all of history is rewritten so that his parents never meet, his father becomes a familyless loser instead of creating the wormhole, and Professor Z doesn't get a scholarship from his company to go to college. Which is all well and good. What no one attempts to explain is why, in this new history, Josie never attended Blake Holsey High (Though later events suggest that her presence there may have been engineered to keep her close to the wormhole).
- To complicate matters further, it eventually turns out that both Vaughn's mother and Josie's father are time travelers, so without Pearson's wormhole (the basis for Time Travel), Josie shouldn't exist either.
  - Speaking of which, where did the wormhole she uses to go back and Set Right What Once Went Wrong come from, if it doesn't exist in that reality?
- And if the ball isn't timey wimey enough, it turns out that returning the hairclip was really secondary: in returning to the past, Josie lets Pearson steal her Qi Gong ball, which the wormhole has turned into a free-energy device, and which forms the basis for his later experiments, eventually leading to the wormhole, so it's really a Stable Time Loop. And also a ball, of the timey wimey sort.
  - Except that, two seasons later, when Josie travels back in time and retrieves the ball, rather than bringing about the the alternate universe seen here, Josie returns not to her own time, but to a shunt timeline where the world has been totally devastated, with her the only living human being. Though this may have been the doing of other time travelers, trying to preserve the timeline for everyone else.
  - And as it turns out, the hairclip wasn't even all that important, as Pearson's future wife practically jumps him as soon as she finds out that he has the ball, so on top of everything else, the important lesson the experience is supposed to teach Josie and Vaughn — that you shouldn't make even the slightest change to history — turns out to be entirely false.
  - Let's just say that the wormhole makes weird shit happen and leave it at that.
Doctor Who, again and again. Over the course of the show, nearly every theory of Time Travel has been used. How about "The Aztecs", where they explain that you can't really change history? Or "Day of the Daleks", where they find out the Daleks have conquered Earth in the future, and prevent it (using someone from the now-gone future, in fact)? Or in "Father's Day", where they create a Temporal Paradox and deadly flying time monkeys eat everything on the planet? Let's not even get into all the Wayback Trips. Usually, the theory of Time Travel is consistent within a single story, but there are exceptions even to that. As the Doctor himself says, "I told you it was complicated." The trope name even comes from one of the Doctor's many attempts to try to explain why Time Travel didn't always seem to work the way it should.
- When the 10th and 5th Doctors meetup during a Children in Need Special the 10th is in shocked disbelief to be seeing his former self, then goes on to use memories he picked up as the 5th meeting his future self to defuse the situation. When the illogic of this is brought up (not to mention the violation of multi-doctor meetup Canon established from the other 3 times this has happened), both Doctors mumble something about "Timey Wimey" and move on.
- Possible handwave in the revived series, as the Doctor explains that the destruction of Gallifrey/The Time Lords/The Eye of Harmony really has changed all the rules of time travel, so any contradictions with the rules laid down in the old series can perhaps be excused. Or at least, they could be if they hadn't already been broken repeatedly prior to the revival. And if they hadn't already broken the new rules since the revival. Still, points for trying. How very Post Crisis.
- It's actually mentioned in the old series of Doctor Who that the Time Lords deliberately took Gallifrey out of its own time to prevent any potential rogue Time Lord from ever altering Gallifrey's history. Then again it's also stated time and time again in the old series that Gallifrey can't be destroyed, and look what they did in the NA and the new series.
- In "The Fires of Pompeii", a companion asks why the Doctor will thwart aliens but not stop a particular historical catastrophe, and the Doctor replies that some points in time are fixed, while others are in flux. His being a Time Lord allows him to perceive which is which, and act accordingly; even against his nobler instincts.
  - The writers hinted at this before the episode, even. The premiere episode of the revived series established that the Doctor perceives things we mere mortals don't, and there are numerous references to the whole fixed/unfixed concept. It's surprising that it took them four years to actually do an entire episode about it, when it clears up a lot of confusion.
- The Doctor has also stated in the past that his knowledge of history is "perfect"; this may mean that he knows exactly what he may or may not change.
  - More about Fixed points in time in "Sarah Jane Adventures". Sarah Janes' parents dying is a fixed point in time because she has seen it, remembers it, and knows it happened. Changing that would be bad.
- The novels have an equally insane version, in which the 8th Doctor (infected by Faction Paradox biodata) ends up interfering slightly in the life of the 3rd Doctor, leading to him regenerating on the wrong planet and being infected by Faction Paradox biodata. Of course, Faction Paradox live and breathe this trope (as well as Temporal Paradox) at the best of times. It's their hat.
- The New Adventures had the concept that Time itself was a sentient entity who consciously fixed various timeline hiccups resulting from time travel with the Doctor as her champion.
- In the first season finale of the NS, the Doctor says that the TARDIS protects itself from paradox. Whenever and Wherever the TARDIS lands, the events that led it to go there, and led to the world it's in once it's there, become unalterable.
The Ghosts of Motley Hall a series told from the point of view of the ghosts from various eras who haunt a derelict stately home in England discover one Christmas that, for no reason ever explained, the house has slipped through time to the Victorian era. The ghost of Sir George meets and talks to a young boy who is excited about his presents. Sir George realises the boy is himself, and only then recalls a vague memory of having met an elderly man on Christmas Eve, who he had assumed to be some distant relative whom he never saw again.
The Girl From Tomorrow has a very large one: Tulista travels back through time and retrieves Silverthorn. Taking him out of the timeline should screw with the future, but doesn't, thanks to one very Delayed Ripple Effect. Silverthorn then takes Alana back to 1990, and their presence in the timeline again fails to interfere with the future properly. It's only after Alana takes them both back to the year 3000 that people begin to notice the Delayed Ripple Effect, despite the fact that if anything, it should have interfered with two time periods. They then attempt to resolve this by returning Silverthorn and Jenny to their respective time periods, only to have the capsule somehow U-turn and return to 2500, meaning there are (briefly) duplicates of Alana and Lorien. This is further compounded when Silverthorn builds a Portal To The Past to get some nuclear bombs. This is only resolved when Petey resets the Portal to send Silverthorn and Draco to 70,000,000 BC.
Heroes can't decide if they are going for Static Time Travelling or a Dynamic Time Travelling. And that's the least problematic thing.
- Strangely, it seems the farther into the future they see, the more pliable time becomes. For example, if Hiro tries to fix something close to the present, for example, saving Charlie's life, or capturing Usutsu, it's impossible. Can't change it no matter how hard they try. However, the apocalyptic future they inevitably go to in every single season so far, they always find a way to avert that. Well, usually, that seems to be changing for season three, and even before that, some things were constant across all the alternate futures. Peter's scar, and Hiro being Bad Ass with a sword.
  - Listen carefully, this is both Fridge Logic and Awesome But Practical; in the Heroes-verse, time has torsion! This means that one can Set Right What Once Went Wrong only with "leverage"; only the passage of sufficient time permits time to be altered, thus preventing seers and Time Travel from being a Deus Ex Machina!
  - The Charlie issue was kind of resolved in a "she's already dying" way rather than "time travel won't let me save her" way; this is more or less repeated with his father in the next season (only "it's his time" this time, instead of the already dying thing). As for the random jumps through time... he spends the rest of the season learning to control his ability; it turns out he just needed to get back the self-confidence which he had lost since he realized he couldn't save Charlie. The time jumps are a bit convenient, and that Hiro's explanation makes no sense doesn't help. Not to mention that nothing else they've done with time travel has made any sense. They don't even try to be consistent, it seems. Very comic booky... which is probably the point. Still makes for bad headaches, point or no.
  - Actually, this may be internally consistant, though silly: A time traveler can only change the future if a present character travels forward, sees the EndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt, then returns. Hiro to the blown-up future, Hiro to the everyone-is-a-mutant future, Peter to the infected future, etc. They cannot change anything when they go back — even future Hiro going back to present Peter with the cheerleader message didn't actually change anything in that future.
Kamen Rider Den-O spikes the Timey-Wimey Ball like no other: when an Imagin wreaks havoc in the past, it's translated into the present oddly. For example, if you were standing next to a bridge support, and an Imagin went to last year and broke it, you would see it vanish into thin air now. (As opposed to, say, remembering that time a year ago when they had to fix the bridge 'cause a monster trashed it. But since it was trashed in the past, it had to have been rebuilt at some point, right? Apparently, when an Imagin breaks something, the fix's Ontological Inertia fails shortly after the time the Imagin went back.) Now that's the Timey-Wimey Ball at its wibbly-wobbliest.
- When the Imagin is killed, the Timey Wimey Ball then uses the original memories of people in the future to repair the damage to the past. However, anything or anyone who is not remembered is not restored. So now no-one remembers the bridge getting repaired because as far as the great unwashed masses know, it was never broken in the first place.
- At one point, a Xanatos Gambit relies on Ryotarou's memory rebuilding the entire timeline after his sister and husband deliberately break it in order to force their unborn daughter out of the timeline (long story). But wait, what about when Yuuto disappeared and Hana stated that Ryotarou's memory wouldn't be enough to bring him back because Ryotarou didn't know him as a young teen? Then... what about all the people Ryotarou didn't know or remember in the present time? What happened to them?!
The Stargate SG-1 episode "1969" suggests a Stable Time Loop, while "2010" and "Moebius" are explicitly about changing history. And "Unending"... technically wasn't time travel, but uses a different model still, and the only way to make some sense out of it is to suppose that Teal'c's older self consists exactly of the same particles as his younger self, which is obviously false.
- Then Continuum is just... well, complicated, as it makes for a whole new kinda confused, as it follows NONE of the already used settings for Time Travel and brings us the mathematical confusion of what happens to the poor sucker in an open wormhole as someone causes a temporal reality shift.
- Of course, there's also the time loop in "Window of Opportunity"...
- Actually, 1969 isn't so much a Stable Time Loop as a self-perpetuating time loop. It's stable because Hammond never bothers to do anything to stop it from happening. If he'd said 'No, don't go through the gate you'll wind up in 1969', time travel would've acted how it always acts in Stargate and the episode would never have happened. However, since no one ever stops SG 1 from going through the gate, it becomes a loop.
- The Stargate Universe episode "Time" begins with a recording showing most of the crew dying on a new planet, viewed by the crew who found the recording on their first visit to that planet in a new timeline. Drama ensues, people start dying from a new disease, and a new recording is made and sent back into the past for the crew in a new new timeline to find.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has the relation between Benjamin Sisko and The Prophets. While it appears to be a Stable Time Loop, there just enough wrong with it that it fits here. In the first episode, Sisko meets The Prophets, who live outside of time, and have great difficulty even conceiving of a 'linear' existence. They and Sisko have a nice chat, and Sisko tells them that the Bajorans revere them as gods, it seems that The Prophets weren't really aware of this. It gets tricky from here... As the Prophets seem to 'get' their position, they then (not that the flow of time should mean anything here...) start doing all the things that they are revered as gods for. Okay, one loop, fairly simple Ontological Paradox. Later on, we actually find out that Sisko was born from a relationship his father had with a woman possessed by a Prophet with the explicit purpose of conceiving Sisko. So, Sisko visiting the Prophets made it possible for him to be born in the first place, so that he could visit the Prophets and tell them that they were gods. Keep in mind that if Sisko didn't tell them they were gods, they wouldn't need Sisko, they would have just kept on being non-linear, not to mention the enormous effect the resulting lack of religion would have on Bajor. Now what really twists the boat is that The Prophets are supposed to exist outside time, yet they clearly change after Sisko's first meeting. So they possess both timelessness (from being able to interact with anytime freely) and their own timeline (Which is clearly affected by Siskos visit) These paradoxes and timey-wimey balls are not really explored in the series (though more 'common' forms of time travel are) and the series can be enjoyed without worrying about the timeline of timeless entities. Still, there's rather a lack of coherency.
- It's possible the Prophets never changed, though. The viewers see Sisko changing them, but since the Prophets have no concept of time, they're kind of impossible to change (except when the plot requires, of course). To everyone else they have always acted like gods. It's like a massive Reset Button, only we never see what happened before the reset. The events of the series cause the prophets to act the way they do... which cause the events of the series. Stable Time Loop.
- A somewhat more minor example occurs in an episode where Miles is jumping foward in time. However, every single one of these jumps shows what they future would be like if he didn't jump, allowing him to correct mistakes. In at least two cases, the future person reacts very calmly to the time-displaced O'Brien (In one case, calmly telling him that he just finished his autopsy), and tell him what has gone wrong now, and what to do to prevent this future.
  - That's because the future he's shown is the one in which only his most recent jump didn't occur. By the last several jumps, the other characters are aware he's randomly jumping through time; they just wouldn't be aware of his most recent jump until he showed up, and then they'd make the assumption. (Especially considering in the last one, he's dead in their timeline, so what else could he be but a past copy?) In fact, they were probably waiting for him to jump forward so they could tell him how to avert the events.
  - Then, of course, it helps that the one who quickly figures it out and calmly responds is Julian...
  - The whole thing gets kind of lampshaded, when two versions of O'Brien try to figure out the paradoxes and give it up, simultaneously saying, "I hate temporal mechanics!"
- Actually, if you pay attention to the dialogue in the first episode, they mention that when Sisko first goes through the wormhole it disrupts their existence, which is presumably the cause of... something? Probably the reason he's the Emissary.
Star Trek Enterprise: The whole Xindi arc is a big Timey Wimey Ball. So the Sphere Builders tell the Xindi to go nuke Earth, because they know (through their semi-time-travel) that in the 26th century, Earth will come kick their ass. So the Xindi go do a preliminary Earth nuking, which causes the Humans to come over and kick their ass, now.
- The Sphere Builders misled the Xindi into believing that humanity destroyed—or rather, will destroy—the new Xindi homeworld, because the Sphere Builders knew that, in the 26th Century, the Federation (which by then will include the Xindi) will decisively defeat the Sphere Builders at Procyon V.
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect", the crew was caught in a Groundhog Day Loop. They didn't notice at first, but subtle changes began to creep in. The crew then try to program a message into Data's brain with information that would be sent back in time when the loop next reset itself. Using this new information, Data was able to change his actions enough for them to escape the loop.
- It's likely that the Groundhog Day Loop they were caught in was entirely isolated - it didn't effect the rest of the universe around it, just the Enterprise and that other ship that got caught in the loop with it: this almost explains why the changes added to Data's brain in the future were still there when he was returned to the past. Another ship, caught in the same time loop had apparently been there for over 100 years, which made even less sense than the Enterprise's predicament.
  - One of the TNG comic books Forbidden Fruit had a similar event happening, with Data being sent back in time to prevent Wesley from making a device that would seriously threaten the Enterprise, by causing another person to return from the past and infect the ship with a highly virulent, incurable disease. Data died almost as soon as he arrived back in the past - but his destruction also destroyed the device Wesley was making, therefore wiping out the previous timeline.
Star Trek Voyager has shown that in the 29th century, The Federation has become a sort of Time Police, making sure no one messes with history. The fact that the previous (chronologically) series have never had a problem with timecops showing up is not addressed. They were even admonished that they ought to have been held to account before. Not to mention, if they did, we'd never know about it...
- The episode contained the morally questionable practice of arresting and trying a man for a crime he had yet to commit. The rather profound implications of this are casually Handwaved with an assurance that he'll be combined with his future selves somehow before the trial, nevermind that said future selves are already part of a Temporal Paradox since it would presumably be impossible for him to carry out the crime once he'd been arrested for it. This might not be so troubling if it weren't clear that his future selves were suffering from some kind of severe psychological breakdown, the present self would not decide to commit the crime for many years and thus could not be said to have intent, and being removed from command at this early point would have prevented said psychological breakdown from occuring in the first place. Given equal apparent opportunity to prevent someone from becoming a criminal before it was too late, or punishing him for merely being capable, under the right circumstances, of going through with it, which would you choose? Apparently The Federation, at least according to Voyager's writers, prefers the latter.
- Deep Space Nine's Sisko and his companions are visited by the Department of Temporal Investigations in Trials and Tribble-ations. The agents mention that they have an extensive file on captain James T. Kirk.
- Star Trek Voyager also had one of the most illogical time travel plots. They're passing a planet and detect a massive explosion. They investigate the planet and find no life. Janeway and Paris are transported back to before the explosion. It turns out that Voyager's attempts to reclaim them caused the explosion. They stop trying which pushes the Reset Button and they pass the planet without incident. The entire episode ignores that they never intended to go to the planet in the first place, so the whole thing never should have gotten started, since there never would have been an explosion to cause them to investigate.
  - They didn't just stop trying; Janeway stopped their attempt by firing her phaser into the time-portal technobabble thingy. So time reverted to normal. Or something.
- Also, no list of Star Trek timey-whatever-things... is complete without mentioning Yesterday's Enterprise. The fact that it brought back Tasha and had Klingons fighting the Ent-C aside, it made absolutely no sense.
  - A quote from Jonathan Frakes re: Yesterday's Enterprise: "To this day I do not understand Yesterday's Enterprise. I do not know what the fuck happened in that episode. I'm still trying to understand it – but I liked the look."
  - It's not that confusing if you don't think of it as time travel. It's more like two parallel universes that fold into each other. The timeline skews into a 1985/1985A scenario, only the events of 1985A are what cause the standard 1985 to exist. That is, the Enterprise crew sending the other Enterprise back to whence it came. What makes it different from Back to the Future is that there are multiple timelines, as opposed to one that gets changed. Nothing changes, and both timelines do happen.
  - To further explain this: Star Trek TNG clearly uses the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (as seen in an episode where 100.000 Enterprises appeared. So the Enterprise C always disappeared, causing the events of the timeline in that episode. Sending it back to 2344 they split the timeline: theirs remained intact, but it created the continuity of the other series.
- Star Trek XI is even more disturbing: since it erased the later series from continuity, every time cast from the later series travelled back in time is a huge paradox on its own. Mostly First Contact, since if Enterprise is still Canon, its events have happened, which is quite a Mind Screw...
  - Word Of God has it that instead of erasing the later series, it just split off a new timeline, so that the later series still happened in the original timeline but have not in the new timeline. Either way, Enterprise is still canon.
  - It's possible that a few movies down the line, if they get tired of the reboot version, they'll close it by saving Romulus in the future, thereby preventing Nero's time jump and Vulcan's destruction, which would wipe out the alternate continuity ... while also making the Enterprise crew martyrs to save two planets. It'd be a nice way to wrap up the series.
While each Terminator movie managed to be internally consistent, The Sarah Connor Chronicles combined the continuities of the first two movies and then added some of its own time travel plotlines. Predictably, it's getting a little weird. The episode "Complications" is particularly troublesome. It introduces a new stable time loop and strongly implies that Derek and Jesse don't come from the same version of the future.
- The episode title wasn't enough of a hint?.
Quantum Leap: When a Mad Scientist/Children's TV host proposes that everyone's lives are strings and if you could tie the ends together you should be able to travel along that string, Sam agrees that he is basically right, but that it is important that you ball up that string first so that all the days of your life touch. Which makes sense.
- As revealed in the finale, all time travel is monitored by God to create the best possible timeline and presumably keeps Leapers and good people from being erased by paradox and such.
Timeslip, a 1970s British series, presented a form of time travel where the past, not "really" being able to "happen again" is "fixed" — by which we mean that you can interact with the people there, but not alter events, and can be hurt, but not "seriously". In the first serial, a time traveler is shot dead, and collapses, unconscious, leaving blood, but no wound. She wakes up, but still feels the pain of having been shot. We get the first minute of a muddled explanation about it being a sort of shared hallucination before it's dismissed as too complicated to explain.
Many descriptions of Sapphire And Steel imply it's a Time Police show. Instead, it uses time travel - and the rules thereto - like a Cop Show uses criminal procedure: arbitrarily.
Seven Days. Let's start with the fact that Parker's past self disappears whenever his future self travels back in time... and so does the time machine. While this makes some sense if one believes that the same person can't exist twice at the same time, what makes no sense is that nobody on the team ever notices that Parker is missing from the current team meeting. And nobody ever notices that the time machine is missing from the hangar either.
- There was an episode where an accident during time travel splits Parker into a good and an evil version. The good version is killed, so the evil version is sent back in time again, creating another good version.
  - In their own defense, Project Backstep had to jury-rig crashed alien technology. There is no evidence they put it together correctly, or are even using it for its intended purpose; all that can be said is that they have reverse-engineered a means of transporting one person into the past seven days maximum under strict power limitations. It is strongly implied in one of the episodes with aliens that the time travel effect is just a weird byproduct of what was supposed to be a Faster than Light engine, and the original alien ship didn't do any of this. Of course, by this point Frank had killed the Antichrist and become a shaman, so, YMMV.
Red Dwarf. Just about any time travel episode, but most especially the Season 6 cliffhanger in which the Dwarfers' scary future selves blow up Starbug, apparently killing everyone on board. Season 7 opens with Lister explaining direct to camera that, because they'd been killed, their future selves never existed to come back, therefore they hadn't been killed, and this is also why Starbug is suddenly bigger. The intelligent video camera suffers a ~~nervous~~ explosive breakdown trying to understand this.

Close Live Action TV

While Chrono Trigger was generally consistent about how its time travel worked, there were a few odd instances. Like how Marle paradoxed herself out of existence, despite time travelers not being directly affected by any other changes they'd made during the game. For instance, you can save Lucca's mom, but Lucca still remembers when she was crippled instead of having all her memories changed. Or when the future Robo came from was erased from existence without affecting him.
- The Timey Wimey Ball also applies to game mechanics: One can open a chest in the future, return to the past and open the chest again to get two items from the same chest.
  - This also means that it is possible to beat the optional dungeon at the end of the game 3 times. However, if you start by beating the earliest version of it the newer versions will also be empty.
- Chrono Cross makes a feeble attempt to patch things up by using parallel realities as the ultimate outcome of fiddling about with temporal mechanics, and then showing the physical effect of a catastrophic temporal paradox via the Time Crash (wherein a time experiment pulled a city borne from the "good" future into the "bad" future, thereby destroying it, after which it froze and was pulled back to the game's present when the laboratory conducting the experiment, and its opposite number from another alternate reality, were ripped from their native timelines.)
Episode 204 is merely the Spiritual Successor to Day Of The Tentacle, which is also extremely wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. The game runs on San Dimas Time to allow the characters to flush small, inanimate objects to each other through time via their time machines, when the time stream is altered, any changes are visible to the characters and happen with a "magic" effect and sound, and at the end of the game, the characters travel back in time to yesterday to turn off the machine that caused the Big Bad to become evil, thus causing a huge paradox and defeating the point of them even disembarking on their adventure in the first place. But that's okay.
- Doctor Edison's original plan (not taking into account the diamond breaking and the trio ending up in different eras) was for them to simply go back in time and turn off the aforementioned machine. Obviously, he didn't care about any potential paradoxes, since the plan would create a big one. Then again, he IS a mad scientist.
Final Fantasy VIII features Time Compression, in which past, present, and future are all mashed together into one big Timey Wimey Ball, ultimately creating a Stable Time Loop when Squall gives the idea for SeeD to its founder and essentially sets himself up for the events of the game. Not to mention various characters' consciousnesses being sent into the past and interfering with events there, and the vague and arbitrary fashion in which it's all apparently supposed to work.
- Before that, Final Fantasy I has the 2000-year time loop, which is triggered by the four Fiends sending the almost-dead Garland 2000 years into the past, and then he sends the fiends 1800 years into the future so that they can send him into the past. But if the loop ends when Garland is sent to the past, how exactly do the Light Warriors have enough time to kill the Fiends in the present before going to the past themselves?! And for that matter, Light Warriors in the past or not, what the heck does Garland/Chaos gain from continuing the loop if he admits himself that he'll eventually die at some point in the past and not remember any of the time-loop business before being sent into the past in the first place?
  - "Oh, no. I've gone cross-eyed."
  - "What does he gain?" Well, it's nothing logical; Garland just hates the Light Warriors so much that just killing them once isn't enough for him, oh no. He wants them to suffer and die a thousand deaths at his hand. He wants to kill them over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, for eternity.
Legacy Of Kain. Time-travel, paradoxes, Decoy Getaways, and so much more! It would take an entire page on its own to list everything... but you can always see for yourself at the other wiki.
The ending of Ocarina of Time created two timelines. Wind Waker follows the adult Link's track and Twilight Princess Follow the other. Better question would be which of the past Zelda fit where.
- Don't forget the Song Of Storms. Adult Link learns it from the Windmill Guy, who's ticked because "some Ocarina kid" came 7 years ago and played it, messing up the windmill. Guess who the Ocarina kid is? Where did he get it? From Windmill Guy, 7 years from then. Gah!
  - The "creation" of the Song Of Storms out of thin void is what The Other Wiki describes as an Ontological Paradox. A very common hazard of Stable Time Loops.
- The Master Quest remake has an even crazier violation of causality. In the original Spirit Temple, you had to clear half the dungeon as a child in order to retrieve an item used as an adult to access the second half. In the remake, you have to repeatedly switch between child and adult to clear the temple, including pressing a switch as an adult that reveals a treasure chest in a room that only child Link can access. This implies that you travel back to before the switch was pressed!
  - Must be like Lavos in Chrono Trigger: The switch and chest transcend time. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good Hand Wave for Timey Wimey Balls in general. And by good I mean lazy.
- And don't even get started about the black tower in The Legend Of Zelda Oracle Of Ages ...
  - It actually might be simpler than one migt expect, since the flow of time is stopped while it's being built, and before Veran started monkeying around in the past, the tower was never finished. So effectively, the tower was built in one day. Suppose that, had Veran not influenced Ambi, work on the tower would have stopped the next day. Since time is not actively moving forward, the more work is put into the tower, then the taller it would be the next day, when no further work would be put into it. Ergo, it creates the illusion to the people in the present that the tower is building itself.
- Majora's Mask. Outside of the whole time-resetting-so-you-don't help-everyone-but-they-all-live-happily-ever-after-anyway thing, how is it that rupees you put in the bank are still recorded when you go back to the first day? Seriously, there can be up to (and a little past, if you do it right) 5000 rupees, but the day before you didn't even have an account!
Mario And Luigi Partners In Time. This was lampshaded at one point, where doing something in the past gives E. Gadd an idea in the present, and he notes how paradoxical it is.
Original War.
The recent Princeof Persia trilogy is one massive example of timey-wimey craziness. At the end of The Sands of Time, the Prince entirely reverses the events that just took place, making it so the events of the first game don't happen. This creates a paradox, and in Warrior Within the Prince is being chased by the Dahaka, a timeline guardian who is trying to ensure that the timeline proceeds as it was meant to. The Prince inadvertently creates a Stable Time Loop when he kills Kaileena and creates the Sands of Time, the very thing that he was traveling back in time to prevent. Then, he discovers a way to co-exist with himself in the same timeline, which he uses until his normal self in the past timeline is killed, allowing him to remove the Mask of the Wraith. At the end of the second game, he has killed the Dahaka and successfully prevented the Sands of Time from ever being created, causing another disruption of the true timeline. In The Two Thrones, the Prince discovers that his paradoxical actions in Sands of Time mean that the Vizier was never killed and war has been unleashed on his homeland. The Vizier captures and kills Kaileena, once again unleashing the Sands of Time and effectively repeating the events of the first game in a different setting. The Prince eventually kills the Vizier seals away the Sands again and seems to have learned from a all his futile time-travel, as he leaves the end of the game be with no further meddling.
Episode 204 of Sam And Max, Chariot of the Dogs, focuses on Time Travel. Within it, several stable time loops are created, including one that is required for getting Sam and Max to the time machine in the first place and another that comes into play in episode 205. However, as if completely ignoring the idea of stable time loops, much of the puzzle solving revolves around completely altering the time stream just so that you can fix a problem created by Max's personality the moment you start time travelling. One section even has Sam and Max accidentally letting themselves from the first season take their time machine, effectively rewriting everything the player had done in the past year, AFTER a needed macguffin to advance the plot was taken out of the time stream.
- But then, this is Sam and Max, and it stands to reason that any time travel plot WILL bring in to play every time travel concept as fast as it can for the parody, since it only has a few hours before the episode is over.
The game Second Sight seems to be this. When John Vattic finds his way to the records room to find Jayne dead, he seems to flash back to the point when she is supposed to have died to save her, eliminating the reason he flashed back at all. This happens a few times in the game, to the point of Mind Screw. However, what's really happening is that the "past" the player is experiencing is, in fact, the present, and the "present" is a premonition caused by the protagonist's latent psychic powers emerging. It's pulled off extremely well.
The recent DS point-and-click adventure game Time Hollow suffers from this trope at times. At one point, you rescue a mother and son from dying in a bus crash. Immediately afterwards, time refuses to change. So you try again. And again, nothing happens. Turns out the mother deliberately RE-changed events to cause her and her son's death. This is handwaved with an explanation that objects and people pulled or otherwise sent through a time warp become 'detached' in time.
- Although it may make your head hurt a bit more when you are able to talk to the mother, older, in the timeline in which you saved her, even though that timeline, from your perspective, DOES NOT EXIST because she keeps changing the past to prevent it.
Timesplitters on the Gamecube and whatnot relied on Stable Time Loops for plot progression. For example, early on in the game Cortez receives a key after holding a conversation with himself through a grate in the ceiling...then later, holds a conversation with himself through a grate in the floor and drops himself the key.
- And then in the games conclusion, Cortez Changes the past, stopping the Time Splitters from ever being created, complete with his Present being changed from a ruined battlefield to a beautiful landscape, with no real effect on him, or anyone else from his time.
- This utter disregard for consistency is all worth it for the scene where Cortez is stuck in a vault with security systems trying to kill him, which the player plays through several times, thanks to the Stable Time Loops, and Even gives himself the password, seemingly picking it out of thin air.
World Of Warcraft got a big scoop of this when the Caverns of Time were introduced. Ingame, this is the home of the Bronze Dragonflight, Guardians of Time, which need the players help against the Infinite Dragonflight which are trying to mess up the timeline. But really, it's just an excuse to let players reexperience some of the key moments in War Craft history, although in a different way (instead of Thrall escaping captivity with the help of a human girl causing distractions, the players need to bail him out by force). If you screw up, the Bronze Dragons just hit the Reset Button until you get it right. The Doctor may have used the TARDIS for sightseeing, but the Bronze Dragonflight runs a travel agency.
- And then there is the novel trilogy War of the Ancients. Despite some dramatic changes (such as saving an entire race that originally went extinct), its apparently okay to mess with time as long as the end result is roughly the same. Of course, it also helps explaining why said race appears rather plentiful in World Of Warcraft after having been said to be extinct in an earlier novel...
  - Considering that that Aspect of Time's hobby is to collect stuff (items, buildings, vehicles, pieces of landscape, people) from interesting points in time, it plausible that his underlings are not particularly concerned about the finer points of causality either. this may ultimately lead to their Face Heel Turn where they become the Infinite Dragonflight.
Command & Conquer - Red Alert series - seriously, the series by now has something in the range of 2 seperate timelines from the first game, two from the second, two from that game's expansion, and then three from the third game, with a further three path's from THAT game's expansion. Even more brain-busting, Red Alert led to Tiberian Dawn by way of Allies winning both Red Alert 1 and 2 - Red Alert 3 is made by way as a divergence at the end of Red Alert 2.
- Your head hurts now
- What do you think the term "Chronosphere" translates into?!
One puzzle in Escape From Monkey Island involves a time-travel maze where, at one point, you encounter your future self (and, later on, your past self, in exactly the same situation only controlling the other Guybrush). Taking an incorrect course of action (usually saying something wrong as the future self) creates a "paradox" that throws you back to the start of the maze. The puzzle goes a long way towards demonstrating the problems with a Stable Time Loop.
- "I guess you are more likely to shoot yourself." Cue the Swirly Energy Thingy.
What, nobody's brought up Braid yet? The whole freaking game is based on manipulating objects that essentially transcend time. And don't even get me started on the "Time and Decision" levels!
Close Video Games

In Bob And George most of the characters can never find out what kind of rule Time Travel goes by, and one person once said it can be changed by the setting on the time machine. However, it appears that they follow Stable Time Loop rules, as no time period is ever affected by what happens in another. Indeed, the only way time travel is different than going to a different dimesion is that people think it may change history.
- Dr. Light's lab is clearly shown being pre-destroyed by a time ripple tearing through it and enforcing events from the new past. So yes, the past can be changed if you use the time machine right.
- The ending however, suggest a stable time-loop, as it ends with a suggestion from a time-travelling ghost of Zero telling Wily to not activate him so he won't kill everyone. Then they all fake their death and move to Acapulco to prevent a temporal paradox.
LookingForGroup has a big fat temporal loop in the Kethenecia arc in Book 3, but really the arc underlies the whole story so far. It's still uncertain if the protagonists can actually change the timeline should they chose to, since so far they did their best to fulfill the prophecies.
Three words: Dresden fucking Codak. This is what happens when Dada Comics undergo Cerebus Syndrome; leave your sanity at the door.
Melonpool used copious amounts of time travel and past-self and future-self meetings and going back in time to solve problems caused by previous time travel excursions. Eventually their universe began falling apart from all the time travel problems.
Earthsong has a bit of timey-wimey-ball action, since character are pulled together to one time, and then returned back to the moment they left after an indeterminate amount of time.
Trying to track the timeline changes in Misfile may lead to you repeating this trope name over and over and over again. Just Take Our Word For It.
Narbonic features an extended time-travel subplot which establishes that it is difficult, but not impossible, to change your own history. Physical time-travel takes all the energy that exists in the Universe or, as it turns out, in some other universe that's just out of luck, but it's possible to transfer your consciousness back or forward in time into your own body, and you can undergo changes as a result of altered behavior. For instance, Dave never smoked. At several points, the question of paradoxes comes up, and it is immediately dismissed by pointing out that thinking about it could cause it to happen, so it's better not to.
- The same storyline provides an example of inconsistent time travel effects within a single sub-plot. Dave didn't cease to have ever smoked until after the time travel; however, Caliban's demotion, though also caused by the time travel, was established backstory before the time travel occured.
Minions At Work: Pretend it never happened.
There don't seem to be any concrete rules to Sluggy Freelance Time Travel. Possibly justified by the presence of beings like Father Time, Uncle Time, and the Fate Spiders who have an interest in making sure time runs smoothly and/or in a fun way.

Close Webcomics

In the double-episode "Two futures" of Captain Planet And The Planeteers, Wheeler uses a time pool to go back and prevent himself from receiving the fire ring. This results in a crapsack future because the Planeteers never became a team and saved the environment. He then goes back and prevents himself from preventing himself from getting the ring. Then they both escape into the time pool again and merge for some reason. Never understood that bit, myself. To make sure the viewers knew things were restored to normal, a scene of from the utopian future is shown at the very end.
The Kim Possible movie A Sitch in Time begins with Kim and Ron splitting up, causing Kim to become worthless in fighting evil thus the Supervillains got hold of the Time Monkey, that Shego eventually stole and created a Bad Future with her as the ruler. But in the end, it's revealed that Shego was the one that caused Kim and Ron to split up in the first place. So basically, Shego only got the Time Monkey because Kim and Ron split up, but Kim and Ron split up because Shego used the Time Monkey...
The plot of a Pinky And The Brain episode, in which the mice try to obtain a "World Domination Kit" from the future. It doesn't even try to make sense, but suffice to say it ended with the lab full of hundreds of Pinkys and Brains, and the ending tune changed to "They're Pinkys, they're Pinkys and the Brain Brain Brain Brain Brain Brain Brain Brain Brain Brain."
This episode of Tek Jansen, a series of shorts originally created for Stephen Colbert's show, illustrates how bad (or awesome) this trope can get.
- A short summary for all the non-Americans who can't see the video: The Prince and his three attendants, one of whom is named Schlorb, crash land on a planet. Tek Jansen arrives (and to clarify arrives means appear out of nowhere with a time machine) from the future to protect them. Then a second Tek Jansen arrives from further in the future and shoots the first Tek Jansen. Tek explains that in five minutes the first Tek would have eaten a couple of berserker berries, gone insane, and attacked them. He then eats the berries and goes insane. A third Tek Jansen arrives from sometime and shoots the second Tek. He says that Schlorb explained everything to him, but does not remember when. A fourth Tek arrives from the future and sends the third Tek into the past because Schlorb has an important message for him. A fifth Tek accidentally arrives naked with some lady on top of a console. The fourth Tek leaves (and to clarify leaves means disappear with the time machine) with them. A sixth Tek walks on screen with two clean shirts and does not recognize the Prince or his attendants. A seventh Tek arrives and shoots the sixth Tek because one of the shirts had too much starch in it. The seventh Tek is then eaten by a slime monster. An eighth Tek arrives in some sort of armor and asks if he was eaten by the slime monster yet. The kids say yes and Tek leaves frustrated. A ninth Tek arrives and says that he is pretty sure that he needs to take Schlorb into the past, and proceeds to do so. A battered tenth Tek arrives and warns the kids to stay out of caves, then leaves. An eleventh Tek arrives and says he knows of a great cave that they can camp out in. A twelfth Tek arrives, shoot the eleventh Tek, hands the group an egg beater, tells them to hand it to the next Tek that appears, and leaves. The Prince points out that this is pretty fucked up. A thirteenth Tek arrives fighting a giant egg. Tek grabs the egg beater and leaves, still fighting the egg. A fourteenth Tek arrives and explains that all this time travel has opened a chrono-rift in the space-time continuum. He is going to go fix it, but he wants the kids to do exactly what the next Tek tells them to. He leaves. But then a large group of Teks arrive all pointing in different direction. They proceed to fight each other, and the episode ends on a cliffhanger. This all happens in two minutes. You got all that?
In Transformers, after Thrust shoots Starscream with the [[BFG Requiem Blaster we see a shot of Rad as an eight year old waking up in his parents' car and asking tiredly where the Mini-Cons are (implying his "present" mind was momentarily in his past body). Then cut to all the kids in an alternate future where a slowly dying Hot Shot tells them that the Transformers have all been eaten by Unicron because they didn't know that the Mini-Cons were servants of Unicron and were led to their doom. After this, cut to the kids now being at the moment of the Mini-Cons' creation millions of years ago inside Unicron. Rad then touchs High Wire's hand and frees him (and by assocation all the other Mini-Cons) from Unicron's control by reminding them of their past/future happiness together. The Mini-Cons then know to go to Earth after they leave Cybertron to meet Rad and the other humans. Cut back to the humans returning mere moments before Thrust shoots Starscream, whereuoin the Street Action Team combines into Perceptor and knocks the gun away, causing Thrust to miss Starscream completely. And none of this is EVER EXPLAINED.

Close Western Animation

Red Vs Blue starts out with a Stable Time Loop when Church keeps going back in time and ends up causing almost every problem that happened to the Blue Team. Then in season five, Wyoming uses his time travel ability (which Church was originally using without knowing it) to try and win the battle. Tucker has Ripple Effect Proof Memory thanks to his sword and they end up doing things, and then undoing them. For example, Caboose is killed by the tank, and Tex gets knocked out/killed by Wyoming. In the "final draft" of the timeline, Tucker yells at Caboose to stay away, and warns Tex that Wyoming knows that she's there. Then it turns back into Stable Time Loop when Caboose's mental image of Sister, who is a guy, gets pulled into the real world. S/he ends up materializing next to a dead Wyoming, who's suit malfunctions, sending him all the way back to Sidewinder. Turns out, he was the mysterious "Yellow Church" that fans speculated about for years.

Close Web Original

In Time Agent, your objective is not to win. Your objective is to have already won... without Time Travel being invented. This is probably the least confusing part of the game.

Close Boardgames

There are a few people hanging around who've travelled into the future at a little under one second per second. Special Relitivity demonstrates how objects in different frames of reference experience time differently. Giving any astronaut (or someone who spends a lot of time in aircraft) with a twin a very mild example of The Twin Paradox.
The Higgs-Boson, according to some people.

Close Real Life

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Examples: