Emergency Temporal Shift

"We've lost — but only in this timeline. Opening a breach now!"

— Ralph Karlsson, Into the Breach

When it comes to avoiding a threat, it's not enough to head elsewhere: sometimes, you have to go elsewhen.

A common tactic of characters with ready access to a time machine, this puts them out of reach of whatever they happen to be up against (unless of course, the threat in question has their own time machine).

In some instances, this might involve a Blind Jump into a different time period - either because that's just the way the method of time travel works, or simply because the escapee doesn't have enough time to aim for a specific point in history. In a few cases, it may even be an unintentional but fortuitous escape caused by a freak accident.

In more calculated forms of time travel in which it's possible to select a destination, the temporal jump might not be limited to a straightforward attempt to escape a threat, but an effort to alter history so the threat never emerges. Of course, whether or not that will actually work is another matter entirely.

Compare Extradimensional Emergency Exit, the extraplanar counterpart to this trope.

Not to be confused with Time Travel Escape.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Negima! Magister Negi Magi: Chao Lingshen uses this to evade the magical teachers trying to capture her. She only warps about half a day but since nobody else is aware of time travel at the time, her disappearance leaves her would-be captors at a loss.
• In the opening sequence of Pokémon 4Ever, Celebi escapes a Pokémon poacher by jumping 40 years forward in time, taking its attempted rescuer Sam (a young Professor Oak) along for the ride.

Audio Plays

• In the Big Finish Doctor Who episode "Year Of The Pig," the villainous Detective Chardalot owns a fob watch that's also a portable time machine capable of transporting him a maximum of one hour through time and two hundred kilometres through space. Though quite useless for Chardalot's ultimate goal, it comes in handy when Toby chucks him out of the train to Brussels, allowing him to escape certain death and get to his hideout ahead of the Doctor.

Comic Books

• The Avengers: During Roger Stern's run, Kang is driven insane by being forced to experience the memory of every other Kang being killed, and runs off into the wilds of Limbo. It later turns out he used a time machine to try and escape, splitting his timeline in two — one Kang ends up in Chronopolis, and the other ends up with the Council of Cross-Time Kangs.
• Blake and Mortimer: "The Diabolical Trap" has Mortimer get into several close calls with the time machine, notably escaping a Torches and Pitchforks mob in the Middle Ages - leading to a local legend about a fiery-bearded devil escaping in a puff of smoke.
• Irredeemable. Plutonian and several other inmates are on the verge of escaping The Alcatraz when Qubit shuts down the Portal Network, stranding them there forever. Unfortunately one of the inmates has fists that can knock you back in time, so Plutonian gets him to hit him to just before this happens, jumping into the portal and stranding Qubit there instead.
• In Suske en Wiske, this is almost guaranteed to happen near the end of any story involving the Teletimemachine, to the point that the authors started to lampshade it.
• Brainiac's Blitz: When Supergirl is about to catch him, Brainiac uses a portable machine to send himself to another time period.

Film — Live Action

• Back to the Future: After seeing the Libyan terrorists shooting Doc Brown, Marty McFly finds himself next in the firing line, and is forced to escape via the newly-completed DeLorean time machine - he's merely trying to escape through sheer engine power, but ends up travelling from 1985 to 1955.
• The Omega 13 of Galaxy Quest is eventually revealed to not be a doomsday device as initially suspected, but a time machine capable of reversing history by exactly thirteen seconds. This comes in handy when Sarris infiltrates the Protector during the finale, killing most of the bridge crew, mortally wounding Jason and leaving the ship on a collision course with Earth; using the Omega 13 allows Jason to tackle Sarris before he can open fire.
• Very early in Predestination, the Temporal Agent is sent to the 1970s to stop the Fizzle Bomber's reign of terror, only for the latest explosive to go off in his face before he can completely contain it. Near-fatally burned, he only survives because a good samaritan pushes his Field Kit back into his hands, allowing the Agent to transport himself back to Bureau headquarters in the 1990s and receive medical attention. It's later revealed that the samaritan is none other than the Temporal Agent's future self, left practically unrecognizable thanks to all the reconstructive surgery.
• In Star Trek: First Contact, the Enterprise is able to destroy the Borg cube before it can assimilate Earth; unfortunately, the Borg themselves escape the destruction of their ship via a sphere ship that they promptly pilot through a temporal warp before the Enterprise can shoot it down. As a result, a Bad Future ensues in which Earth was assimilated by the Borg long before Starfleet was ever established, forcing the Enterprise to follow the Borg through the warp in order to preserve the past.
• Tenet:
  • Midway through the film, Sator captures the Protagonist with the aid of his future self (moving in reverse). When agents of Tenet storm Sator's base, both Sators flee into a Turnstile (the machine that allows time inversion), seemingly disappearing as the present Sator escapes into the past.
  • When the Protagonist inverts and fights his past self at Freeport, he flees their tussle by leaping into a Turnstile. However, this only looks like an escape from his perspective; From the past Protagonist's un-inverted POV the reverse happened and the future Protagonist seemingly appeared out of thin air and attacked him.
• Throughout Time Bandits, the eponymous thieves often end up having to access the Time Holes to escape imminent danger, most prominently the Supreme Being pursuing them across history - though they've also needed to escape being arrested by Napoleon's officers, to get away with loot stolen from King Agamemnon, and to avoid drowning in the North Atlantic following the sinking of the Titanic. Though in the final case, they had help from Evil.
• The Time Machine (1960):
  • The Time Traveller stops in the 1960s and finds himself in the middle of a nuclear attack, during which, the detonation of an "atomic satellite" causes a volcanic eruption — prompting the Time Traveller to hurry back to his machine and travel forward in time, narrowly avoiding death by lava flow.
  • Near the end of the movie, the hero enters the Morlock lair to retrieve his time machine, and ends up having to board it right as the Morlocks attack him.

Literature

• Letters from Different Years by Kir Bulychev has this trope as the main plot point. Kaleria accidentally discovers that slender lorises can make jumps to the future to escape imminent danger, and the story focuses on her lab exploring the phenomenon. They manage to locate the hormone responsible for time-travelling, but by the end of the story, they are still unable to predict when a time jump can happen (sometimes the lorises try to escape or fight the danger by natural means) or what factors influence the distance and length of the time jump.
• In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the heroes attempt to leave the eponymous restaurant by stealing a ship from the carpark, only to find that they've accidentally pinched a stuntship programmed to crash into a sun for a rock concert. Fortunately, there's a teleporter installed in the ship, but thanks to the incomplete controls, the four of them are flung into opposite periods of space and time: Zaphod and Trillian find themselves back on the Heart of Gold in present time, while Arthur and Ford appear on the Golgafrinchan B ark bound for prehistoric Earth.
• "Ripples In The Dirac Sea": The protagonist of the short story has invented time travel and is about to present his discovery at a scientific conference. However, his hotel is set on fire and he is trapped with no way to escape the flames. He sets up his portable time machine and flees to the past. The problem is that with his version of time travel it is impossible to change the past. No matter what he does in the past or how long he spends there, as soon as he goes back to the present he finds himself back in his hotel room reverting to his original age and physical condition and once again about to be overwhelmed by the flames. He keeps escaping back to the past but every time he returns to the present to reset himself, he uses up a few more seconds of "present" time. He knows that sooner or later he will run out of time, lose consciousness before he can activate the machine again and die in the fire.
• The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World. After finally tracking down the time criminal He, James diGriz and his wife Angelina break into He's lair. Unfortunately, He uses his time-helix device (time machine) to escape into the past before diGriz and Angelina can kill him.
• Thief of Time: The yeti have technically been extinct three times, because they have the ability to basically "save" their lives and reload them if something goes wrong, basically retconning the universe into whatever killed them not happening - as one of them demonstrates by getting decapitated by Lu-Tze and suddenly being back in one piece.

Live-Action TV

• This happens a lot in Doctor Who, usually involving the Doctor finding himself in a tight spot and making a quick dash for the TARDIS.
  • However, the Trope Namer belongs to the elite Daleks of the Cult of Skaro from "Doomsday", whose casings have built-in time travel technology, so in the event that their plans go awry, they pull a Villain: Exit, Stage Left with a bark of "EMERGENCY TEMPORAL SHIFT!"
  • With the Master having stolen the TARDIS and left the Doctor stranded at the end of history in "Utopia," the very next episode ("The Sound Of Drums") kicks off with the Doctor, Martha and Jack escaping the ravenous Futurekind by using Jack's hastily-repaired vortex manipulator.
• Misfits:
  • Curtis's ability to time travel is uncontrollable and triggered by guilt, so it's very common for it to activate when something's gone horribly wrong: it can be something as directly threatening as being cornered by a villain that's already killed one of his friends, or it can be indirect as evidence of the team's crimes being discovered. Whatever the case, it immediately sends him back in time and fix things.
  • After being sold Curtis's power, Seth the power dealer gives the freshly souped-up time-travel power to a guilt-ridden old German Jew who uses the power in an attempt to kill Hitler. Unfortunately, Hitler is still relatively healthy in the period selected and more than a match for an octogenarian without a single day of combat experience, so poor Friedrich ends up being forced to retreat back through time with a stab wound to the belly. Worse still, Friedrich dropped his phone at the scene, unwittingly giving the Nazis the technological advantage they needed to win World War II - kicking off a Bad Future.
  • In the same episode, Friedrich hastily returns the power to Seth before being executed; Seth can't use the powers he extracts, so he transfers it to Kelly - right in the middle of a shootout with Nazi security forces, allowing Kelly to zap herself out of danger. And then right back to the scene of the attempted assassination, where she snatches the phone off Hitler and kicks the crap out of him.
• Red Dwarf:
  • "Rimmerworld" features this twice in a row, by accident: having picked up a teleporter from a derelict Simulant vessel, the crew use it to escape the collapsing craft - only to accidentally transport themselves back to Starbug a week too early, earning them a stern talking-to from past Kryten. Later in the episode, they use the same teleporter to escape from the prison on Rimmerworld, only to find themselves in a future version of Starbug, where future Rimmer takes great delight in informing them that something terrible has happened to Lister...
  • In "Tikka To Ride," Lister attempts to misuse the Time Drive in order to pick up some emergency curry supplies from Earth in the 23rd century, only for the crew to end up in Dallas, 1963. After accidentally killing Lee Harvey Oswald before he can take the shot - and making themselves look like assassins in the process - they find themselves cornered by secret service agents, forcing Kryten to hastily transport them at least a year into the future... only to find that a Bad Future has ensued as a result of Kennedy being saved.
• In the Colombian series Siempre bruja (Always a Witch), Carmen, a slave girl in 17th century Cartagena, is accused of witchcraft after she's discovered having an affair with the master's son, and before she's to be burned at the stake, she makes a deal with a warlock to get her out of there before her execution. Right as the pyre begins to burn, she's transported to the 21st century, where she discovers the "magic" of he internet, slavery was abolished almost two hundred years before, women could actively participate in society, workers have a right to demand better treatment, and that both rich and poor have a right to be treated equally under the law.
• Stargate SG-1: In "Moebius, Part 2", the alternate SG-1 is escaping in the time-traveling puddle-jumper with Goa'uld death gliders in hot pursuit. They finally escape when Jack O'Neill triggers the onboard time machine, jumping them 5,000 years into the past.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: In the episode "All Our Yesterdays", the inhabitants of the planet Sarpeidon flee into the past before their sun goes nova.
• Star Trek: Voyager: In the episode Death Wish, one of Quinn's many attempts to escape Q involves transporting the ship back to before the Big Bang.
• Tensou Sentai Goseiger: After betraying his comrades, the Gosei Angel who would become Brajira used a forbidden time travel technique to escape punishment, ending up in the present day. The technique also mutated his body beyond recognition.
• A frequent occurrence in The Umbrella Academy (2019):
  • In the episode "Number Five", Klaus returns from his accidental jaunt into the past - but now wearing combat gear, a traumatized look on his face and a good deal of blood on his hands. Turns out he ended up stranded in the Vietnam War for nearly a year, and indications are that he only figured out how to correctly operate the briefcase controls in the middle of a battle that would have probably killed him otherwise.
  • "The Day That Wasn't" concludes with Number Five destroying a chunk of the Commission's headquarters, then using a stolen briefcase to escape the blast radius and travel back to the present. Unfortunately, he ends up landing right in the middle of the events that began the episode, undoing all the Character Development the rest of the Academy underwent in the meantime.
  • At the very end of "The White Violin," the Academy team discovers that their efforts to stop the apocalypse have failed and all life on Earth is about to be wiped out in a colossal asteroid impact triggered by the final battle. Number Five's only solution is to use his teleportation powers to send them all back in time so that they can escape imminent death, hopefully getting a chance to avert the disaster before it ever happens. Thankfully, he manages to get it working seconds before the concert hall goes up in flames.
  • In the same episode, Hazel and Agnes use a briefcase to escape the same disaster, exchanging a kiss before vanishing into the past just ahead of the firestorm.
  • At the beginning of the second season premier, "Right Back Where We Started," Number Five's aforementioned gambit accidentally scatters the Academy across the 1960s, while Five himself winds up in a Bad Future in which the Russians invade the United States. Though the Umbrella Academy's badass future selves appear to be holding off the invaders, it's all for nothing as an apocalyptic nuclear strike is launched at their location; Five is only saved by the timely arrival of a significantly older Hazel, who uses his briefcase to give him a lift back into the past before the blast wave can reach them.
  • In the second season finale, the entire Academy ends up being gunned down by the Handler, killing all but Number Five. However, just as he's about to be served a coup de grace, Five decides to take Reginald Hargreeves' advice by travelling just a few seconds back in time instead of decades - landing himself in exactly the right time and place to avert the crisis.
• At least Once per Episode in Voyagers!. Any time the protagonists are in a dangerous situation, they time travel to a random location.

Radio

• In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978) the heroes end up getting cornered on Magrathea by the galactic police and trapped behind a computer bank that's about to explode due to sustained gunfire. However, the explosion ends up saving their lives by unexpectedly flinging them forward several million years to Milliways, the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons, Dragon magazine #65 article "Timelords". A member of the Timelord Non-Player Character class has two powers that allow escape through time.
  • The power "Move Self Forward in Time" allows the Timelord to go forward in time up to two minutes for each Character Level they have. The Timelord simply disappears and re-appears at the designated time.
  • "Move Own Group Forward in Time" allows the Timelord (and one other character per Character Level) to move forward in time up to two minutes per Character Level.

Video Games

• Halfway through Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Kain acquires a time-streaming device in Avernus Cathedral, but finds little use for it until the final battle against the forces of the Nemesis goes horribly wrong. With his back to the wall, he uses the device and finds himself fifty years in the past - back when the Nemesis was still known as William the Just. Kain tries to retroactively save Nosgoth by killing William... only to end up turning the entire country against his fellow vampires in the process, for as far as the people of the era knew, a vampire just murdered their beloved boy-king for no reason whatsoever.
• Chrono Trigger: Crono and Lucca are held responsible for Marle's disappearance by the castle guard, who immediately chase after them and corner them in the nearby forest. This leaves the trio no choice but to jump through a time gate which sends them into 2300 AD. And it's NOT very pretty....
• Dino Crisis 2 ends with Dylan and Regina managing to find a working Timegate that can send them home - and with only minutes to go before the facility's self-destruct sequence concludes. Unfortunately, Paula ends up getting pinned beneath a falling bank of equipment; Dylan opts to remain behind with his future daughter even if means dying with her, telling Regina to head back to their home time period and find a way of rescuing them there. Regina reluctantly agrees and departs - but not before reminding Dylan that he still owes her one...
• Dishonored 2: One level in the campaign allows you to time travel between the past and the present thanks to local time having warped as a result of a dark ritual. In the past, you have to deal with a mansion full of guards, while in the present, the decaying house is infested with bloodflies, forcing you to switch between time periods in order to evade danger and avoid obstacles. Fortunately the bloodfly infestation is limited to a few locations, so you're usually safe in the present, and you can use the Outsider's Timepiece to see into the other time period before you enter to plan your movements more carefully.
• Dota 2:
  • Weaver's ultimate ability Time Lapse sends himself 5 seconds back in time, resetting his position, health, and mana to whatever they were at that moment. Naturally, this is almost always used as a "get out of jail free" card to escape from bad situations.
  • Faceless Void has a smaller scale version of this with his old ability Backtrack (later added as a late-game talent), giving him a chance to avoid damage by jumping back in time and dodging it. His Time Walk does something similar by undoing any damage he took in the last 2 seconds (but does not reset his position, instead sending him to a nearby location of his choice).
• Dungeon Crawl: Followers of Cheibriados, god of time, have a variant: the Step From Time ability temporarily removes them from the flow of time, allowing time to pass without them. They eventually return to the same place in the same condition as when they left, but chances are any enemies that were menacing them have since given up and wandered away from the area.
• Ecco the Dolphin: The Atlanteans used their machine to escape into the past when the Vortex attacked Earth long ago.
• In Fate/Grand Order, the Final Boss of "Heretical Salem" lacks the Break Bars used by the other bosses of Epic of Remnant. Instead, time simply resets and she is restored back to full health. You have to deplete her health bar several times over before she finally backs down, ending the fight.
• When you lose a game in Into the Breach, the Vek begin to swarm the battlefield. To avoid being wiped out, your mech pilots will jump to another timeline in order to try and stop the Vek invasion there. Also done at the end of the game, when the pilots bail before they eat a Renfield Bomb explosion to the face.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: By the time Link manages to meet the villainous Skull Kid atop the Clock Tower, less than six hours remain until the moon falls onto Termina. To make matters worse, Skull Kid proceeds to use magic to accelerate the moon's fall, thus reducing the remaining time limit to five minutes. Fortunately, Link manages to take the Ocarina of Time back from his enemy, and upon remembering the Song of Time he plays it to travel back in time.
• Overwatch: Tracer's time travel abilities make her an evasive Fragile Speedster in combat. Her Blink ability has her skip forward in time, appearing to cross distances in seconds. Her other ability Recall lets her jump back in time to where she was 3 seconds ago, allowing her to avoid danger and undo damage. She makes use of these in the short "Alive" in her duel against Widowmaker, rapidly avoiding the assassin's shots with Blink and using Recall to save herself from a tripped mine.
• Red Alert 3: Tanya's Time Belt ability jumps her back to the place and amount of health she was in a few seconds ago. However, it's not always a lifesaver as it's hard to time properly, and depending on the tactical situation she might actually be left in a worse position.
• Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time: In the final mission of the chapter "Go West Young Raccoon", the Cooper Gang's van drives off the edge of a cliff, with Murray unable to apply the brakes or deactivate the rockets. Thinking quickly, Bentley uses Murray's necklace to transport them to prehistoric times and hope for a safer landing.
• Titanic: Adventure Out of Time begins with disgraced British secret agent Frank Carlson finding himself on the receiving end of a bombing run during the Blitz, and apparently escaping death by a freak accident that sends him hurtling back to April 14th 1912, where he has a second chance at the mission that ruined his life - assuming he hasn't died and been reincarnated as his younger self or something. Should you screw up the mission this time, you won't get any second chances - you'll just get killed in the Blitz... or a takeover by the Nazis, the Communists, or an atomic bombing.
• Titanfall 2: One level in the campaign allows you to time travel between the past and the present after a massive accident at an experimental weapons facility warps time. ^note  Interestingly, Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2 came out only 16 days apart In the past, you have to deal a base full of enemy soldiers and robots, while in the present, the decaying base is filled with prowlers who want to eat you, so whether time traveling will actually save you is anyone's guess.
• In Warframe, Protea's Temporal Shift ability allows her to place a temporal anchor that she can activate at any time during the duration of the ability or when she takes fatal damage. In either case, Protea is rewound back to her previous position and her health, energy, and ammo stores are reset to how they were when she cast the ability. During her boss battle in The Deadlock Protocol, this makes her functionally invincible until you obtain the Xoris to slowly disable this ability to end the fight.
• Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? (1997):
  • The player and Ivan Idea have the sheer luck to walk in on Carmen herself in 1961, right before the launch of Yuri Gagarin's first manned spaceflight. After a spirited attempt at apprehending her by Ivan, Carmen exits via a time tunnel; it soon turns out that she's hidden the Chronoskimmer somewhere on the base, trusting that you'll be too busy trying to find it to pursue her. She's actually hidden it inside the rocket, and you don't find out until you've helped Gagarin clear it for launch - meaning that Carmen might have been victorious if you hadn't managed to retrieve the Chronoskimmer in time.
  • After this mission, you have access to the Chronoskimmer and can travel anywhere in history, while Carmen can only use the time tunnels to access places she's previously visited. Consequently, she's constantly travelling to stay one step ahead of you until she can finally reach her ultimate goal... and unfortunately, you're still delayed by your need to actually find clues to her next destination in line.

Web Video

• Solid jj: "Back to the Future in 5 Seconds" uses a similar setup to the one in the movie: Doc and Marty try to escape from attacking Libyan terrorist using Doc's time machine. Except here, Doc's time machine can only travel 5 seconds backward in time, resulting in Doc and Marty arriving at the exact same time the Libyan terrorist starts shooting at them and making the whole thing pointless.

Western Animation

• Mega Man (Ruby-Spears): The plot of "Future Shock" is kicked off by Mega Man attempting to save Dr. Light from an attack by Dr. Wily in this method using Dr. Light's experimental time machine. When the machine returned without him, Mega Man believed he trapped Dr. Light in the future and set off with Rush to find him, unaware Dr. Light had just been blown out of the machine just before it left.
• Futurama: Played for Laughs and Drama in Series Fauxnale "Meanwhile". Fry tries to commit suicide by jumping off a high building. Luckily, he has a device that can reset time by ten seconds and take him back to the moment before he jumped. Unluckily, he jumped more than ten seconds ago, putting him just outside of the roof's reach, and leaving him trapped in a cycle of perpetual falling. It doesn't end well. But then, it totally does.

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