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alt title(s): Meanwhile In The Past 
Sarah: Arlington? Arlington? Where've you gone? Oh god, I'm stuck here in the late Jurassic without a time machine.
Narrator: Meanwhile, in the early 20th century, Arlington Wolfe, cross-time detective, is trapped on an iceberg.
An unusual form of Meanwhile Back At The resulting from the liberal use of Time Travel or a story split between more than one time period. Logically, there's no "meanwhile" to time travel; things that happened in the past happened in the past, so the idea of needing to do something "in time" is ridiculous.
Generally, this trope involves multiple characters existing in separate time periods whose actions affect each other. Rather than being a simple Flash Forward for the sake of a joke, the future period has its own storyline that is affected by events in the past.
In some cases, the simultaneity element is justified by a Portal To The Past, where the time machine is only able to perform time travel to a relative amount of time forward or back. In this case, spending an hour on the far side of the portal means an hour has passed at home as well, and the "meanwhile" makes sense.
In the worst examples, the "meanwhile" has no real reason, yet events happening in the future are treated as if they were simultaneous with events happening in another time period. This is particularly silly when the time machine is otherwise able to travel to any arbitrary time. There may be a Handwave involving the Timey Wimey Ball to explain why the time traveler can't just come back one second after he left regardless of the amount of time spent in the past/future, but often it's entirely overlooked. See San Dimas Time.
In the better examples of this trope, there is no actual "meanwhile", and within the story the causality matches the chronological order of events, but scenes in the past and future are intermingled to present the illusion of simultaneity. In this case, the director is using out-of-order storytelling to preserve drama which would be lost if the "past" story were fully explored before showing the "present".
Sometimes the characters in past and future can communicate with each other, either directly or through Writing Back To The Future. Obviously, communicating backwards in time requires Applied Phlebotinum. In this case, if the communication is point-to-point instantaneous (like a phone call or radio message), it's usually an example of a very limited Portal To The Past; if not then it's usually just telling the story out of order for dramatic purposes.
The actual phrase " Meanwhile In The Future" is usually used tongue-in-cheek except by inexperienced writers, but there are examples of legitimate comic books using it with a straight face.
Note: Please don't duplicate entries between this trope, San Dimas Time, and Portal To The Past.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- In Drifting Classroom, main character Sho and his entire elementary school have been sent to a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Several times in the story, Sho's mother, still in the past, has received a psychic message from her son cryptically asking her to plant a Deus Ex Machina to rescue him from a cliffhanger that he's encountered in the future. She usually has to go through a short storyline to put everything in place, while the audience is waiting for Sho to escape the cliffhanger he's in.
Comic Books
- The Swedish comic Goliat would announce cuts with captions like "Simultaneously in the Stone Age ..." in its time-travel arcs, without apparent irony.
- The Flash had a whole storyline that relied on this for it to work. The Flash (AKA Wally West) is stuck thousands of years in the future, forced to go past his top speed over and over again in order to get closer to his home time. Each time he does this, he risks dying — but he survives because the love of his girlfriend, Linda, is "like a lightning rod" which keeps him from getting lost in time and space. Meanwhile, in the...present, Linda has given Wally up for dead and moved on to a new guy. The moment she kisses him, (thus severing the connection between herself and Wally) the story cuts to an image of Flash, in the future, seemingly dying, despite the fateful kiss having happened over FOUR THOUSAND YEARS AGO from where he's standing.
- This happens at the beginning of a storyline in Ultimate Fantastic Four (before they go back to prevent Ben's transformation to the Thing.) Reed is in contact with Sue and Johnny who are both in different time periods. Their communicators are apparently acting as a Portal To The Past for communication ("justified" in that it's Ultimate Reed Richards, the guy who can stretch his brain when he needs to be smarter.)
- Business as usual in Silver Age Legion Of Superheroes stories.
- Belgian comic Suske & Wiske (Spike & Suzy) does this constantly in their time travel stories. Most stories have one of the protagonists use the teletime-machine, in the meantime destroying it. Professor Barabas then spends the whole comic rebuilding it, after which the storyline is swiftly deus ex machina'd by reinforcements (most of the time Jerom). The teletime-machine also has a screen showing the events happening in the past
Film
- Best Defense uses the Flash Forward form of this: the main story involved Dudley Moore on a development project for a new tank, with the secondary story following along with Eddie Murphy as a tank commander going through a Comedy Of Errors largely due to flaws in the tank. The future story reflects the events in the past story as they go along, highlighting the design decisions (and corporate espionage) as they take place.
- At the climax of the film, Eddie Murphy's tank is overheating, leaving him a sitting duck on the battlefield, but Dudley Moore leaps to his rescue with a cooling device ... ten years earlier.
- Twelve Monkeys features characters communicating with scientists in the future with a business's answering machine in the "present", which a team of scientists spend months and years recovering from the decayed magnetic tape. While the continuity is well-explained, the interaction between future and present, even with the time machine, is relatively sequential.
- Frequency, using the device of a ham radio owned by both the thirtysomething father in his time period and the similarly aged son in his, allowing the two to communicate. The timelines fortuitiously collide in the end sequence.
- In The Lake House, two people living two years apart in the same house exchange letters through time. Near the end of the film, the woman (who's the one who lives in the future) realises that the bloke she's been writing letters to is the one that died in her arms near the beginning of the film. Thus she frantically races to inform him of what happened before he gets run over.
Literature
- Alan Garner's novel, Thursbitch, uses this trope with some crossover between times in a small hamlet in England.
- Commander Vimes got, in a strange turn of events, a magical PDA that told him what was happening to his self in a different timeline, where he did not go to Klatch.
He Everybody dies. Maybe more a Meanwhile right now, but a very good example none the less.
- Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon does this with World War II and the 1990s, albeit with no travel or direct communication between the time periods (of course, what happens in the WW 2 story affects the 1990s story...).
- The Michael Crichton novel Timeline justifies the time trip's thirty-six hour limit with the explanation that they weren't actually travelling into the past, they were travelling into a kind of parallel universe which existed in an earlier time, but in which time passed at the same rate as in our world. The time machines only have enough battery life to maintain a connection for thirty-six hours before they needed to be recalled. Or something.
- Many of Alastair Reynolds' books work this way. There's a climax that the book is working towards in which all the characters will end up in the same place at the same time, and parts of the book are told in rough order of how long—in that character's time frame—it will be until the character reaches the climax. Since his books are Space Operas in a setting full of Time Dilation, this leads to quite a bit of skipping around in calendar years, especially toward the beginnings of his books.
- A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones, uses this constantly. Characters talk about, for example, World War II "becoming" longer (i.e. it starts earlier and finishes later), something that is apparently a gradual process, although "gradual" in what is hard to say. Partially justified by the idea that the titular Time City exists in it's own personal timeframe outside the rest of time, but nonetheless, the time travelling doesn't make internal sense. Still a good book, though.
- This is a recurring gimmick in the Nicolas Eymerich, Inquisitor series by Valerio Evangelisti: While the main action is taking place in the middle ages, each episode also depicts a related subplot taking place "simultaneously" centuries earlier or later. And it doesn't even technically involve time travel, making the narrative device all the more contrived.
Live Action TV
Radio
- In the Doctor Who audio play The Kingmaker, The Fifth Doctor and his companions, Peri and Erimem, are stranded in two separate time zones. The story jumps between the two zones, telling the 'before' and 'after' of a sinister plot.
- In The Goon Show episode "The Treasure in the Tower", the plot switches between a pirate ship trying to bury its treasure in 1600 , and an attempt by the Ministry of Works in 1957 trying to find the treasure. At the end of the episode the pirates end up burying their treasure in 1600 in the hole dug in 1957 to find the treasure.
Video Games
- Upcoming Real Time Strategy game Achron will live and breathe this trope. With the ability to jump back and forth through time to create changes you will have to react to your opponent who may not be in the same time period as you.
- The adventure game Day Of The Tentacle jumped between three time periods at the same house; the modern day, 200 years in the past and 200 years in the future. Doing certain things in earlier periods would change the future periods.
- With actual "meanwhile" cuts between them, no less. Its time travel operated primarily on Rule Of Funny and deliberately cartoony logic.
- Similarly, the second Back To The Future game for the NES let you jump between 1955, 1985, and 2015; doing things in an early period would alter later ones.
- Carried out even further with the obscure Bill And Teds Excellent Adventure game for the Atari Lynx. The player could travel to nearly a dozen different time eras, and many puzzles would require setting something up in the past to resolve an obstacle in the future.
- The Time Splitters games: while it's an undeveloped Excuse Plot that ignores the details in 1 and 2, Future Perfect goes the whole hog complete with time-bending radio headsets.
- Two Legend Of Zelda games, Ocarina of Time and Oracle of Ages, have required Link to travel between the present and the past to solve puzzles. Some of this is done in Stable Time Loop fashion, but there are rampant absurdities too. For instance, in Oracle of Ages, you can move seeds in the past to move the resulting vines in the present... as many times as you want. Not to mention the absurd tower that gets more constructed in the Present as it's built... in... the... past?
- As strange as it might seem, this one actually a sort of twisted sense: The titular Oracle of Ages has stopped time in the past while the tower is being built. That still doesn't explain why there are various cutscenes with the tower getting taller, though.
- Those people living in the village near the tower share your concern, as they do note that the tower seems to get bigger.
- No, it still doesn't make sense. If time was stopped in the past, but is still going in the present, then it must have been unstopped at some point, allowing the tower to be completed.
- Black magic was involved. The fact that it didn't make any sense is why the villagers were so worried about it.
- Actually, it was all Portal To The Past. The Oracle herself needs to open one to go to the past in the first place. It isn't hard to believe they aren't being opened, just being activated so people can phisically travel through them. The third level of the harp just creates a temporary portal right under Link's feet - thus why it takes a few seconds to disappear and can be used to go back if you don't move.
- Meanwhile, the events of Ocarina Of Time actually created two divergent timelines, which later games were set in.
- Legacy Of Kain: Defiance has the story spilt between two characters that are in different time periods. Near the end they do eventfully end up in the same time period but as Kain is immortal it makes you wonder why he even cares about waiting for 100 years to meet up.
- There's an even more egregious example elsewhen. Kain at one point uses his telekinetic might to blaze a path through some ruins. Cut to Raziel 200 years later, and the columns are somehow untoppled.
- Made even worse by the fact, later on, you do make use of Kain's temporal trailblazing.
- Everything probably justified due to the fact the reason they were separated in the first place is that Kain broke the Stable Time Loop, so time went a little crazy.
- City Of Heroes has screens that give a real-time overview of the situation in Recluse's Victory, a Pv P battleground set in... the future.
- Sonic CD made use of it as well. It even gave a 'Good Future' bonus when you beat Robotnik/Eggman.
- In Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, the Prince uses time portals dotted around the castle on the Island of Time to get past broken down areas, activate devices that create paths for him in his own time and generally messes with the timeline to survive.
- Of course, messing with the timeline is what got him in that situation to begin with.
- As good as the story of Mario And Luigi Partners In Time may have been, its time-travel system was rather absurd. First, there's the fact that time seems to pass in the Present while you're in the Past and vice versa, like they were separated realms, though this can probably be explained by the whole Portal To The Past thing. Second, the Mushroom Kingdom was taken over by the Shroobs in the past, leaving the Kingdom in the Present.... completely UNAFFECTED! Some might see this as a result of a Stable Time Loop, as Mario and Luigi defeat the Shroobs anyway, but that leads into a Paradox, since they can only defeat them because Present Mushroom Kingdom was free from the Shroob in the first place. Also, they are changing E.Gadd's past heavily... with the only result being him inventing some gadget.
- Well, it could be considered that since they beat the Shroob invasion, the Mushroom Kingdom goes back to normal, allowing their existence (kinda like a Reset Button). What's really odd is is why didn't Toadsworth warn Mario & Co. of EVERYTHING THEY WERE GOING TO ENCOUNTER, since he wasn't a baby during the invasion, thus had extensive knowledge of ALL EVENTS. What a jerkass...
- It should be noted that in the part about E. Gadd, E. Gadd lampshades this trope by noting how paradoxical it is.
- Chrono Trigger is the Ur Example of this
- Freedom Force has an almost literal version of this in the second game, where the heroes have to go into the past to set a timed explosive on the shield generator for the Big Bad's fortress so they can get into it in the future. On the way in, they're recognized by one of his henchmen, who immediately demands that the guards raise their security from now on. "Meanwhile, in the future..." the guards standing outside the fortress disappear and more powerful versions appear in their place while the characters are watching.
- Dark Chronicle does this handily, courtesy of the protagonists' personal Applied Phlebtonium activating a Portal To The Past (or in this case, 100 years in the future, and back again). Because Griffon has incredible powers over time and exists 10,000 years in the past, the two periods are treated as separate fronts in the war. It actually works.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Kids Next Door, "Op FUTURE".
- Parodied in the Futurama episode "The Why of Fry", wherein a temporal paradox threatening the existence of the universe itself cuts away with a jarring "MEANWHILE!" voiceover to a B-story involving Leela dating the mayor's aide.
- But done straight in Bender's Big Score, which cuts back and forth from the main narrative in the future to a B-story in the twentieth century.
- One episode of Super Friends has the ever-so-serious voice of the narrator intoning "Meanwhile, back in the future..." with no apparent irony.
- Helped by the fact that the show was made a decade before Back to the Future came out.
- This troper remembers the line as "Meanwhile, fifty thousand years in the future."
- Similarly, the narrator of Underdog delivered the line, "And at that moment in the present, the Thanksgiving Day parade reappeared."
- Wolverine And The X Men seems to use this trope. The "hunters" appear in the same episode Wolverine get kidnapped and analyzed, every time Wolverine tries to contact Prof X he's always a bit further in his own personal timeline, and the season finale happens at the same time as the people in the future fight Master Mold and the past gets changed..
- To be fair, it can be explained to some extent by the Professor existing in the two different times.
- Justice League's Vandal Savage must have his own field of time around him, as this happens repeatedly and inconsistently. Noticeable at the end of the episode Hereafter.
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