Can't Take Anything with You

"They don't leave much to the imagination."
"Actually, on a robot, they sort of do."

Dr. Silberman: Why didn't you bring any weapons, something more advanced? Don't you have, uh... ray guns? Show me a piece of future technology.
Reese: You go naked. Something about the field generated by a living organism.
Dr. Silberman: Why?
Reese: I didn't build the fucking thing!

— The Terminator

Time Travelers are often prevented from bringing along any modern technology when they go back in time. When they arrive in the past, they have to rely on the things available during that time period.

The reasons for this vary. Sometimes the time travelers simply want to avoid changing the timeline too much, and they realize that, say, leaving a modern gun behind in the middle ages could create all sorts of problems. Other times it's due to a limitation of the Applied Phlebotinum used to travel through time. In the latter case, the time traveler often arrives naked and has to find clothing somewhere. In other cases, the time travel may simply have been a surprise and they weren't prepared.

Sometimes the inverse is seen, where it's not possible to take anything from the past back to the future. (Sometimes this is justified by the claim that, for the object, the future doesn't exist yet.) Since it's otherwise not much of a dramatic limitation, this version usually only comes up in stories where a time-traveler is trying to save something (or someone) from being destroyed in the past. Not to be confused with the old saying "You can't take it with you", referring to how you can't bring material possessions to the afterlife when you die.

See also Alien Non-Interference Clause (where an advanced society is prohibited from interfering with primitive ones), Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing (where shape-shifters lose clothing from taking on a form their clothes can't fit), Naked on Arrival (where a character is naked during their first on-screen appearance) and The Nudifier (which covers circumstances of people losing their clothes due to having them destroyed by magic, powers or sci-fi technology). Compare Mental Time Travel, in which one typically can't carry anything but information.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Averted in The Ambition of Oda Nobuna; Sagura Yoshiharu had his cell phone with him when transported back 450 years in time. That cell phone is a Chekhov's Gun.
• Blast of Tempest: When Hakaze Kusaribe time travels, her outfit falls to the floor and she arrives naked.
• Chao Lingshen of Negima! Magister Negi Magi solves this by improvising with what she has in the current timeline. She still ends up being a genius inventor.
• In Strike the Blood, Reina arrives in the present naked and has to steal clothes. She could bring her magic spear with her because she can create and dismiss it with her powers. When she returns to her time, she vanishes and her stolen outfit falls to the ground. She arrives in her home naked and quickly puts on a bathrobe.

Asian Animation

• Inverted in Happy Heroes; after they return to the future, anything the Heroes leave behind vanishes.

Comic Books

• And one of the Dark Horse series of Terminator comics had a group of T-800s sent back to the past accompanied by a very unfortunate human in whose abdomen they'd surgically implanted future weapons prior to coming back. They ripped him open upon arrival and were good to go, rayguns-wise. Why Skynet doesn't do this more often (or just wrap the weapons in synthetic flesh, the same way it does the T-800 exoskeletons) is unexplained.
• Fantastic Four (1961): The FF travel to ancient Egypt to retrieve some herbs that, somehow, can restore people's vision, in hopes of helping Alicia Masters with it. They get them, but lost them during the time travel.
• Old Man Logan (2016): after wandering around Battleworld in Secret Wars (2015), Old Man Logan wakes up in the cosmically restored 616 universe... completely naked.
• The original War Machine armor was destroyed in this manner after Rhodey was caught in a "time-quake" while traveling back to the present from World War 2-era Germany.

Fan Works

• In The Infinite Loops, carrying things across the Loops requires either that the item be soul-bonded to a Looper (usually occurs with powerful magical artifacts), or that it be stored in a Subspace Pocket at the time the Loop resets. It is technically possible (Depending on the Writer anyway) to put living beings into a Pocket, but this is generally discouraged for obvious ethical reasons.
• House of Summers: Rachel Summers loses her clothes and her wristwatch when she arrives in the past.
  She was naked. That was the first thing Rachel noticed as she picked herself up off the cold ground. She had a few scrapes and bruises, but aside from those, she seemed fine. She was a bit disoriented but tried her best to collect herself.
  It was dark. She instinctively looked to her wrist for the time. But she noticed her watch went the way of her clothes and disappeared as well. She looked to her right and noticed the mansion. Did she do it? Did she go back just before her mother's death?

Films — Live-Action

• Non-time-travel example in Bedknobs and Broomsticks: The protagonists travel to the magical (and animated) Isle of Naboombu to retrieve the Star of Astoroth. Upon returning to the normal world, Mr. Browne unwraps his handkerchief just in time to see it flicker and vanish, as apparently it cannot leave the island.^note Which yes, means that the 20 or so minutes that they spent there was kind of a waste of time plot-wise, though it had humor and Character Development.
• Downplayed example in Déjà Vu (2006), as the present Doug Carlin is able to go back in time with a few articles of underwear, due to the relatively small size of the container and the immense power requirements to send more matter back. Plus, sending back living organisms tends to screw with bioelectrical pulses and result in cardiac arrest, so they'd rather avoid having too much clothing to tear through when Carlin appears out of nowhere in a hospital to shocked paramedics while having spasms and needing a defibrillator to make sure he doesn't die of cardiac arrest right after going back.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, the magic scepter that was causing the time travel caused the people on each end of the time warp to switch places, with all their possessions staying in their own time. Michelangelo notices this when the Japanese nobleman appears in April's clothes, and makes a point of donning some trunks before he and the other turtles go back in time to retrieve April so that the person he switches with doesn't arrive naked.
  • Strangely, as he's the only one who does this, the four time-displaced samurai who switch places with the turtles show up in their historical underwear instead of naked (it IS a PG kid's film after all)... except Michelangelo's, who shows up just wearing the trunks like he had been going commando under his armor.
• Tenet. Inverted with inversion (naturally). Objects can be sent back in time, including messages to people in the past, but not people.
• Terminator is probably the most famous example of the "arrives naked" version. However, the titular killer robots are able to travel back in time because they're covered in living tissue. Presumably, the liquid metal that more advanced models use is able to mimic living tissue closely enough to work.^note According to the DVD commentary, the three reasons discussed amongst the writers were that, along with the T-1000 being covered in living tissue which he shed upon arrival and 'it's just a movie; who cares?' Averted in the third movie, where the T-X has an energy weapon built under her liquid metal exterior, and in Terminator: Dark Fate, where the human time traveler Grace was augmented with future armor, strength-enhancing artificial muscles, and computing hardware implanted inside her body.
• In the movie Timeline, the time travelers deliberately do not to bring anything modern back because they don't want to pollute the timeline. Except for one bloody idiot, whose insistence on bringing along a few grenades screws everyone when he accidentally blows up the transfer point. In the original book, they bring translator earpieces along, but no other modern technology.
• 12 Monkeys is an example that's due to limitations of the technology. However, it seems like objects can pass through so long as they're inside one's body - James Cole is always Naked on Arrival after time travel, but at different points in the film he deliberately brings a spider specimen to the future by swallowing it, and accidentally brings a bullet with him to the present by being shot in the leg in the middle of World War I.

Literature

• In a spin on this, the setting of Garth Nix's Old Kingdom trilogy is hostile to modern technology. Things that work in Ancelstierre, like telephones, machine guns and cars, cease to function once they get north of the border — or even just close to the border, if the wind is blowing from the north. Things made by machines also tend to fall apart. As a result, travelers to the Old Kingdom have to be prepared to bring only things made by hand, and the border guard know how to use swords and bows as well as firearms.
• Though it involves dimensional travel instead of time travel, in The Great Game series by Dave Duncan, Strangers can't take anything with them to other worlds. This includes not only their clothes, but dental fillings, prosthetics, and possibly the contents of their stomachs.
• Time travel is a major part of the plot in the sixth Artemis Fowl book. Due to the extremely unstable nature of the time stream, and the fact that the demon sending them back in time (No. 1) is a novice, he recommends that Artemis and Holly strip down, lest your clothing fuse to your skin. They are both understandably embarrassed, but manage to strip down to their underwear (Artemis is wearing red Armani boxers and Holly is wearing a standard issue LEPrecon one-piece).
  • Their embarrassment forms part of the Unresolved Sexual Tension between the two in this book.
• The Dinosaur Cove series is like this. The kids can't bring anything back to the present with them. They can take their info gadgets back in time with them, though.
• In a short story titled "The Business, As Usual" by Mack Reynolds, a future person who knows how time travel works takes advantage of a time traveler who doesn't by giving him a knife he can bring back in exchange for his clothes. Once the time traveler goes back to the past, the knife disappears, with the future denizen gloating to his wife about once again duping a time traveler into giving up his clothes.
• Teleportation instead of time travel, but the twins in More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon cannot take anything, including clothes, with them when they teleport.
• In Alastair Reynolds' novel Century Rain a force-field prevents travelers to the alternate-1950s earth from bringing through any complex technology at all - a big problem since it opens underground. They manage to get a jackhammer through by disassembling it and reassembling it on the other side, and running a hose through the field to an air compressor.
• Subverted in Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths, where people don't travel in time, but a future leader sends back giant monuments to his victories from the future. These monuments are also extremely destructive weapons ("city killers") when they arrive.
• The Company Novels by Kage Baker use the reversed version: time travel is only possible into the past, and things of the past can't be carried back to the present (their future). The Company gets around this using a very, very elaborate Write Back to the Future system.
• Inverted in the Dinosaur Cove book series. The kids can bring technology with them, like the Fossil Finder, but can't bring anything from the past back to modern times. A Ginkgo leaf one of them tries to bring back crumbles to dust.
• In Dinoverse no one can take anything with them. Including their bodies. Instead the bodies of these intrepid time travelers fall into comas and their minds go back and possess the bodies of large, complex vertebrates - as the series' title suggests, everyone who time travels in the series ends up in a dinosaur. When they get to go home, each character again can't take anything with them, although in one case when a human and an allied dinosaur died in the same instant at the same place having the same kind of self-sacrificial goal, both their minds ended up sharing the human's body. Sadly, this is never fully explored.
• In the Discworld book Night Watch, it's physically impossible for time travelers to take anything with them that doesn't belong in the destination time. Thus, a character who's changed his clothes while back in time will return to the future naked, it's a good idea to eat when you get back because the food you ate then stays there, et cetera. This is not, in fact, always true — one of the time travelers brought his armor with him — but it's a very useful lie. The issue seems to be one of available power and the fact that sending him back is a bit of a rush-job:
  Lu-Tze, explaining to a baffled and annoyed Sam Vimes: "We don't have a damn great thunderstorm and we don't have enough stored time. It's going to be hard enough making sure you don't come out a thousand feet in the air."
• The first Doom novel has this, not when time-travelling, but when teleporting. The characters worry about whether it includes things like intestinal flora.
• Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis use the reversed version: time travelers can bring things from the future to the past, but not the other way round. ...except for things that would have been destroyed shortly anyway.
  • And, of course, a cat, because the cat was going to drown anyway. Except it wasn't, and the net allowing it to go through was a Batman Gambit by time itself to cause a cathedral to be rebuilt in a certain spot hundreds of years later, apparently.
• The Neverending Story: A non-time travel example. Bastian cannot leave Fantastica with anything the Childlike Empress gave him or that he received in Fantastica. This means his clothes fell off him and he changed from the Oriental Prince look to his normal look as both were given to him by the Childlike Empress.
• In The Pendragon Adventure, the Travelers never bring anything from one territory to another, in fear of destabilizing the territories. Later subverted by Saint Dane, who gleefully mixes the territories and increases the technological level of the Earth territories as part of his increasingly complex Gambit Roulette. Bobby eventually gets fed up and brings in technology from different territories in order to defeat Saint Dane's schemes. This does not end well.
• Rhythm of War has this be an issue for a couple of the Fused brands: Husked Ones can't take anything that's not part of their body with them when they teleport, and Deep Ones can phase their own bodies through solid matter but nothing else.
• In Spider Robinson's Time Pressure, the time traveler arrives naked (except for her computer headband thing) and bald because of the limitations of the time machine. Time travel in some of the author's other books has similar limitations, such as an inability to bring living and nonliving things at the same time.
• In the Time Machine gamebook series, the rules of time travel specifically prohibit the player from leaving behind any item from a future epoch, and breaking the rule can supposedly result in being trapped in a time loop.
• Originally in TimeRiders, the team had to be underwater while time travelling to avoid taking a chunk of the concrete floor with them to the past, as well as... in their underwear. Rashim's method seems to avoid that, but they still can't bring anything modern.
• Played with in the Time Scout series- if it can be carried through a portal into the past or future, then it can travel through time, unless it already existed somewhere else at the destination time period. If that's the case, then the transported item or person simply ceases to exist (sending people on a free "holiday" to a date after their birth is a popular murder method with organised crime). Presumably the gold, jewels and other artefacts successfully brought Uptime were/would have been wholly disintegrated in the mean time.
• Henry in The Time Traveler's Wife, who has a disease that causes him to spontaneously time travel. He cannot bring anything that is not part of him, like clothes, money or even dental implants.
• Normally averted in Time Warp Trio, but Played Straight in the cavemen book. The boys have the idea of bringing a whole bunch of stuff with them so that they would seem like gods to the people in the past, and apparently The Book decides that this trope was in effect if you're gonna be a twerp about it. Sam keeps his Nerd Glasses, Fred has his baseball cap and Joe has a straw—other than that, they're naked and empty-handed.
• A similar version happens in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. All sorts of amazing technology works when you're in the outer parts of the Milky Way galaxy, but as you travel inwards they will begin to fail in order of most advanced, as well as faster than light engines working less and less efficiently until failing entirely as well. Eventually, as you get close to the center, even higher brain functions begin to fail.
• When You Reach Me: There had been a number of sightings of a naked man reported during the series. One of the later notes hints at this, saying "A man can only hold so much paper in his mouth." This seems to extend to clothes as well.

Live Action TV

• Played with in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. episode "Bye Bly", when a woman from the distant future arrives naked because long-distance time travel is safer without clothes or jewelry. It's not a strict rule and her mission is to return the Orbs to her time, but she departs as naked as she arrived.
• Bodies (2023) employs this method of time travel, with no particular explanation, setting up the initial mystery when the identical bodies of people who have been shot in the head show up in different times with no bullets for pathologists to extract, and much to Iris Maplewood's dismay, as her futuristic mobility aid is left behind when she travels.
• A non-Time Travel version in the series Forever (2014). Whenever protagonist Doctor Henry Morgan dies, his body vanishes and reappears naked in the nearest body of water, with his clothes apparently vanishing along with any blood he left at the scene. The first time we see him reappear, Henry is immediately arrested for indecent exposure, and it's implied that this happens a lot.
• The Outer Limits (1995): A variation in "In Another Life" as it involves travel to an Alternate Universe rather than Time Travel. When the various alternate versions of Mason Stark are transported to the Eigenphase Industries CEO Mason's universe by the Quantum Mirror, they arrive naked.
• Sam in Quantum Leap is never able to take anything with him during his leaps because he was being shuffled around by a "higher power" that probably didn't want him messing up the timestream with artifacts while he was supposed to be fixing it.
  • Brief subverted in "The Leap Back", when Sam and Al unwittingly switched roles as Leaper and Observer; for unspecified reasons, Al retained the handlink control for the Accelerator, requiring Sam and Al to Write Back to the Future so that Sam could get out of the Imaging Chamber
• The Red Dwarf episode "Stasis Leak" had an inversion where the crew could take things to the past fine, but couldn't bring anything back with them. (A bar of soap used to try it out crumbled to dust; the implication was that — at least using the stasis leak method — anything brought Xty years into the future instantly aged Xty years.) When Rimmer says he wants to bring his past self back, the Cat agrees for once. (Rimmer takes a few moments to figure this out.)
• In the pilot episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the human resistance gets around this by sending an engineer back to the 1960s, where he builds a plasma rifle and time machine from contemporary equipment and stashes them in a bank vault. However, it's played straight later in the episode, when Sarah, John, and Cameron send themselves forward to 2007 and wind up naked on a very busy highway. Double Squick points for this one, considering that Sarah is John's mom.

Tabletop Games

• In the Forgotten Realms, items being sent back in time won't make it if they are more technologically advanced than the destination time period. The same goes for spells. It's also impossible to take anything from the past back to the future with you.
• The Demoreans in Timemaster ^note (but not the otherwise identical race from the same company's Star Ace game) have innate time travel abilities. However, those abilities only move the Demorean. Since most of their plans require advanced tech, they have to get time-traveling renegades to move their gear for them.

Video Games

• In the text adventure game Time Zone, any object taken back to a time before it was invented vanishes from existence.
• Braid probably qualifies for this; you literally can't take anything with you that isn't made immune to fluctuations in the time-stream, and this also applies to any creature (including yourself) that isn't insulated against the time-stream. While convenient in some ways (you can leave yourself the key to a door in one spot, rewind, and then go do something else before going back to reclaim it) it's also rather awkward in others even if it is rather amusing the first few times, to watch a regular key go skipping backwards just because you walked in the wrong direction.
• In Day of the Tentacle, the damaged time machine cannot send living creatures and larger objects, so the player has to find ways around this problem, such as putting a hamster in a freezer and then microwaving it in the future, and putting a sweater in the dryer with 200 years' worth of quarters (which shrinks to doll-size).
• In Duke Nukem Zero Hour, when traveling back in time to the Wild West, it's implied that Duke arrives in the buff. Invoking Terminator 2, Duke asks the local for his clothes, boots, and horse before deciding he doesn't need the horse.
• Invoked by in the main scenario of Half-Minute Hero. If you decide to replay a level, you can't equip any items that you've earned from later levels (the Time Goddess will tell you that doing so would create a Temporal Paradox). If you attempt to equip an item that's been struck out in the equipment menu, you'll start the level with nothing in that equipment slot.
• The cardinal rules of time travel in The Journeyman Project, besides not interacting with anyone not from one's own time, is not taking any important items or leaving any items in different time periods. Stealing bolt cutters from the 3000s to use in the 2000s is OK, though. Just don't leave them there.
  • Even the temporal terrorist Elliot Sinclair adheres to this rule, although for pragmatic reasons rather than a desire to preserve history (which would run counter to his goals): his three robots are all designed to self-destruct in the event they are disabled and presumably captured. For the most part, however, this rule is adhered to only as a matter of coincidence and is frequently ignored, especially in the second game.
• Kingdom Hearts: You can't even take your body with you when time travelling. In order to go to another time, one has to have the ability to separate the heart from the body. Of course, if you have another body waiting for you at your destination, you can always inhabit that vessel when you get there...
• Pathologic 2 has a non-time-travel example. Artemy is warned before entering Mother Boddho's innards that "anything [he] clings to will fall from his hands there", including clothes, weapons, and medicine. The point of his journey is to retreat into the Kin's primal mindset, which includes trusting that Boddho will provide for all his needs. The fact that Artemy can bring only one thing- her panacea blood- back from this sequence further emphasizes its surrealism.
• In Pokémon Gold and Silver, the time machine used to trade with Pokémon Red and Blue will, rather obviously, only allow you to trade first-gen Pokémon with attacks that were available in the first generation (e.g. trading a Cubone will be okay so long as they don't know Bone Rush). A clever bit of programming will allow the traded pokemon to retain their held item, but you won't know until it is traded back to a gen II game.
• In Portal Reloaded, you can bring cubes from the future to the present, but you can't bring present cubes to the future. If you try, the cube disintegrates.
• The Styx Time Gate in the Star Ocean series prevents anyone from taking modern technology (or indeed, anything more than clothes) into the past. It's never explained why this is the case, or what happens if you try.
  • The Japanese guide books explain that it is not technology per se that is blocked, but rather metallic objects. The Time Gate is an electromagnetic phenomenon, and metal or electronic objects would interfere with its operation much like when a person wears metal jewelry during an MRI scan. Carry metal or electronics with you, and at best you'll arrive in a different time and place from where you intended. At worst you'll be dead.
• Superliminal: Like in Portal, certain barriers will prevent you from taking puzzle objects outside the bounds of the puzzle (or in specific areas within some puzzles).
• The Turing Test:
  • The entrance to each chamber has a scanner that prevents you from taking items to the next puzzle.
  • Bonus levels use forcefields and ladders to keep the player from bringing things from the main puzzle into them, and vice versa.

Webcomics

• Discussed in Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: early on, the squad thought it was true, then they noticed that Commander Badass's body hair didn't disappear. When they find out that animal hair can apparently time travel safely, they started demanding to the scientists that they get clothes. The scientists, annoyed that the squad was back-sassing them, gave them embarrassing Christmas onesies made of wool.
• REVEAL OUT!: Zigzagged. When Eeden goes back in time, she does have a few papers with her, and is able to successfully warn her mentor of her future death with the obituary as evidence. They start disappearing soon afterwards, though.

Web Original

• The time traveling boat in possession of the SCP Foundation does not allow anything to be taken out of its time. If you try, it will change it to something that fits the time its in.

Web Videos

• A Glove and Boots video had Fafa and Mario discuss the disadvantages of time travel. One example given is that you show up naked, which is demonstrated using footage from The Terminator where the time-traveling cyborg assassin wound up naked after going back in time from the future. Mario points out that The Doctor never ended up naked when he time-traveled, to which Fafa claims that The Doctor's nude scenes were edited out of the episodes by BBC censors.

Western Animation

• Lampshaded and subverted on The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy in the Big Boogie Adventure movie. Billy asks his time-traveling future self if he's naked because it's impossible for clothes to time-travel, but Future Billy replies that he was actually going naked willingly because he liked to feel the breeze on him.
• Vandal Savage's time machine in Justice League works with a sort of inversion: You can't go back to a time where you already exist, but you can send any objects through that you want. Being an immortal caveman, Savage can't go back himself, so he sends a laptop to himself during World War II in order to win the war for Germany.
  • In a later episode, Superman gets blasted into the future. It turns out Vandal Savage had some grand master scheme that went awry, killing everyone except himself (Immortal Magnificent Bastard caveman Nazi, remember). Savage regretted ruining the world, and he and Superman got another time machine he had working; since Superman was gone, he could travel back in time long enough to foil Savage's plot.
• Done oddly in the Steven Universe episode "Steven and the Stevens"—Steven is riding his scooter when he accidentally time travels a few minutes into the past; for some reason, his scooter and helmet get left behind, but none of his other clothes or possessions.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fast Forward, the turtles and Master Splinter are abruptly zapped to the future. Their weapons and cloth— er, accessories get left behind. No explanation is given, and it doesn't happen on the return journey, though they voluntarily leave future technology where it belongs.

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