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Will of the Macrocosm: patron saint of the Reset Button.
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. — T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"At the end of the episode, everything's always right back to normal." — Fry, Futurama
The Reset Button is any means by which previously occurring drastic events are made partially or wholly irrelevant by the end of the story. This is a prime way of enforcing Status Quo Is God.
Any Reset Button events in a Time Travel story are usually related to, or caused by, a Temporal Paradox.
Specific variants: All Just A Dream, Snapback, and Filler. See also the Reset Button Ending.
Contrast with Here We Go Again. Not to be confused with the End Of The World Special that concludes many anime series, in which much of the damage done in the series is reversed, but the main storylines either remain or become resolved.
Endemic to American TV shows both live-action and animated, particularly from The Sixties through The Nineties, because programming directors like to have the luxury of repeating episodes in any order or no particular order at all.
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Examples
Anime & Manga
- In Excel Saga, the Reset Button is actually a character: the Great Will of the Macrocosm, a floating vortex with arms. Her major purpose is to continually resurrect cast members as needed, which is quite often. Things get complicated when she not only fails to bring back Pedro, but starts sleeping with him. It turns out she and his wife are one and the same... somehow.
- In the Dragon Ball series, the titular Dragon Balls are frequently used as a reset button for resurrecting dead characters, recreating destroyed planets, etc. Entire series are based on the concept of collecting all the Dragon Balls to undo the damage done in the previous arc. Unlike most Reset Buttons, this one actually has limits, especially early on when a specific wish can only be made once. There's also a strict time limit, at least when it comes to resurrecting the dead: the wish has to be made within a year of the person's death. Which could have added complications given that the Dragon Balls spread across the world and become inert for a year after a wish is granted, and are completely untracable until they reactivate.
- Except that when those limits would ever actually mean a damn thing, they just make the dragon stronger. Earlier, the dragon could only wish somebody back only once. Then a main character dies who was wished back once already. So, they just make a new dragon able to resurrect a person as many times as they wish.
- In Sailor Moon, the title character twice serves as the embodiment of a reset button, at the end of the first and fifth seasons. Not only does she bring the entire main cast Back From The Dead in both cases, but in the first season, she also erases their memories (as well as her own) of being superheroes and saving the world, because she just wants to be normal. Of course, she is given her memories back in the very next episode, when a new enemy arrives.
- She also acted as a reset button in the manga at the end of the Infinity Arc when she brought the entire planet back after Sailor Saturn killed everyone on it. Furthermore, she also acts as a universe wide reset button in the last chapter of the manga.
- In the Love Hina anime, any time it seems there might be progression in the relationship between two characters (most usually Keitaro and Naru), an event will occur (typically Keitaro "accidentally" touching Naru's breasts with a consequent Megaton Punch making Keitaro A Twinkle In The Sky) to ensure that Status Quo Is God. Conversely, in the manga, Keitaro and Naru's relationship does progress (though occasionally in a "two steps forward, one step back" kind of way), and the Distant Finale shows their wedding day.
- Not to mention that the Hinata Inn is more or less destroyed on several occasions, but always comes back.
- Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni starts most arcs as if the previous ones had never happened; this at first seems to be Negative Continuity but the first season's final arc implies something more is going on when Keiichi freaks out (confessing to his very-much-alive friend that he can remember killing her) after suddenly remembering traumatic details from the very first arc. In the second season, we're introduced to the character that keeps pressing the Reset Button.
- The Reset Button ending of Mai-HiME is often criticized for undoing much of the drama that unfolded in earlier episodes, as well as for "not really fitting the mood" of the series. May explain why the writers of Mai-Otome went with the Contractual Immortality route instead... well, except for that one character Killed Off For Real mid-series, thanks to the Really Dead Montage.
- The end of Yu-Gi-Oh GX's third season. Understandable, though, considering they killed off just about the entire cast. Was anyone expecting them to stay dead?
- Miaka of Fushigi Yuugi uses her last wish to Suzaku so that the two worlds would return to normal. They don't.
- Portions of the series Saitama Chainsaw Shoujo were rendered moot when it was revealed that the classmates Fumio sliced and diced were actually doppelgangers. The real students were locked in the closets.
- In The Wallflower manga, some progress has been made with Sunako and her unladylike behavior (she hardly ever gets nosebleeds anymore, for a start), but any development that would actually change the manga dynamic for good is reset. The most infuriating example of this is a late chapter in which Sunako finally realizes that she's beautiful and Kyohei finally seems to be having a Love Epiphany in regards to Sunako, only for all of that progress to be undone in the end thanks to a couple of thoughtless words from Kyohei.
Card Games
- In the card game Magic: The Gathering, numerous cards can wipe the playing field clear of any combination of permanents in play and/or cards in hand. Wrath of God
 , Oblivion Stone, Nevinyrral's Disk, Plague Boiler, Pernicious Deed, Jokulhaups, Shatterstorm, Armageddon, Akroma's Veangance, Solar Tide, and Obliterate are more well-known amongst these Reset Spells. There's even Tranquility for wiping out all enchantments. Cards that are closer to literal examples include Worldpurage and Lich's Mirror.
- There's also Rebirth, which sets each players health back to what it was at the start of the game.
- Seriously, NOBODY remembers Yu-Gi-Oh! and its reset buttons? Final Destiny, due to its 5-card discard cost and the game's strict limit of only having 6 cards in your hand at the end of your turn, is virtually unplayable, though. (Note: Certain other cards such as the continuous spell Infinite Cards, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin in that there is no limit to either player's hand size, and Enervating Mist, a continuous trap that sets your opponent's hand size limit to 5, subvert this rule.) More widely used but less powerful versions include Heavy Storm and Dark Hole, which wipes all spells/traps and all monsters, respectively.
Comics
- The end of Angel: After the Fall looks this way, until you realize that everyone in L.A. still remembers Hell A. Everyone knows that demons are real, everyone remembers seeing death or possibly actually dying, and everyone knows that Angel's a hero.
- In the Dark Xena series by Dynamite, Gabrielle convinces a Cthullu type being to hit the reset button, causing everything to go back to the way it was before season 4 of Xena Warrior Princess, but not without consequences....
- The most thorough and brutal reset button this troper has ever seen was the end of the Clone Saga in Spider-Man. Over the course of the last decade, Peter Parker met a resurfaced clone of himself, got Mary Jane pregnant, suffered superpower outages, and gave up being Spider-Man to pursue family life. Everything actually seemed to be changing (some would argue for the better). Then in a four issue arc, Mary Jane was drugged and her baby was stolen, even though she thought she had miscarried (the child was never seen again). And Peter's clone was killed by Norman Osborne, who had been supposedly dead for thirty years! In one fell swoop, Peter was Spider-Man again, his clone was gone, his major villain was back, and he wasn't (to his knowledge) a father.
- Continuing the theme of Spider-Man plot regression. Years later, Osborne taunted Peter by claiming to have kidnapped "May". Peter assumed that he meant his daughter (whom Osborne actually did kidnap), but discovered that his frail Aunt May had been a held a prisoner for nearly ten years, and not dead at all.
- The final nail in Spider-Man's coffin came recently when Peter rewrote the last fourty years of canon by making a deal with Mephisto. He gave up his marriage (and quite a few other historically established facts) to save his Aunt's life. It took a while, but the editors finally undid the last fourty years of stories.
Fan Works
Films
- The Michael Crichton disaster Sphere employed a Reset Button to make you wish you had not wasted two hours of your life in the theater (or 15 hours reading the book). The book's ending is left ambiguous enough that one can infer that the Reset Button attempt only made things worse, by removing the characters' conscious memories but not the effects of the Sphere. The Film Of The Book lacks this Twilight Zone Twist.
- The movie Bewitched, which already didn't make much sense, employed a reset button about 2/3rds of the way through the movie that practically took the story back to the beginning again.
- Galaxy Quest had a very limited Reset Button: the Omega 13 could turn time back thirteen seconds. Just barely enough time to fix a major mistake. Fortunately, it wasn't a plot reset button. The movie was way too good to try that.
- The Russian movie Day Watch ends (thanks to a piece of miraculous chalk) with a huge reset of not just all of its events, but also those of the first movie (Night Watch). Though at least there are some developments right after that and some of the characters seem to retain the memories of the original timeline.
- In the original Superman movie, when Lois dies, our hero starts flying around the earth opposite its rotation so fast that it starts turning backwards. For some reason, this does not, in fact, fling everyone into space but reverses time.
- To make it even more incomprehensible, the thing reverses a future in which Superman took part. The worst part is that he appeared to just leave Lois there, a fact from which This Troper infers that she would still be dead, just from a different crushing.
- The only possible way to rationalize this is to assume that he didn't make time go backwards, but simply flew backwards through time himself, allowing him to stop the second missile and prevent all of the other disasters that he had been dealing with one-by-one before.
- Word Of God says that this was indeed a visual metaphor taken too far. Don't forget, in the comics at this time, Superman was able to travel through time by exceeding the speed of light.
- Which then, in turn, ends up freeing the Kryptonian villains in Richard Donner's [superior] cut of Superman II, forcing Supes to do the "backwards rotation" thing a second time to undo all the crap General Zod started (in fairness, this was supposed to be part II's ending from the get-go; it was moved to part I after Donner got canned).
- Speaking of Superman II, there's also the ending where Superman decides that he can't put Lois Lane in danger, and so he makes her forget who he is. By kissing her. Somehow.
- The 1936 film The Man Who Could Work Miracles (based on an H.G. Wells book of the same name) employs a giant reset button. After stopping earth's rotation to make the day last forever and DESTROYING the entire surface because of inertia, the main character wishes he'd never had his godlike powers and returns to the very beginning of the plot, minus the powers or memory he ever had them. This movie is a rare work of fiction where attempting to slow down or reverse earth rotation proves to be the catastrophic disaster you'd expect it to be, as the earth spins at a staggering 1,667 Kph at the equator. If earth were to stop, the entire population would find itself suddenly propelled eastward at that exact speed, killing everyone instantly.
- Subverted in Mystery Men: Trying to free Captain Amazing from Casanova Frankenstein's mansion, the team is confused by the toggle-switch instructions, and Mr. Furious asks if there is "some sort of reset button". When the toggles are flipped in the wrong order, killing Captain Amazing, Mr. Furious responds with, "Everybody heard me say reset button, right?"
- The Jumanji board game; it's even there in the instructions. What it doesn't say is that the game can even undo time.
- Funny Games uses this in a highly literal sense.
- Star Trek III The Search for Spock is one big honkin' Reset Button which effectively undoes every plot development from Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan. And then...
- Star Trek (2009) hits a reset button for the universe of an entire franchise, while pretty much explicitly invoking the MST3KMantra as a fig-leaf.
Literature
- David and Leigh Eddings' The Dreamers series ends with a massive Reset Button, using time travel to negate the existence of the Big Bad and thus negate absolutely everything that occured in the previous novels. This troper was not amused.
- They did much the same thing in their stand alone novel The Redemption of Althalus.
- There was no Reset Button in Redemption. End spoilers: Daeva, Ghend and the city of Nagharash get detroyed, all the good guys get married, and Dweia is pregnant. Where's the Reset?
- The reset was someone opening a door to the past and swapping a Book of Big Bad (TM) for a noodle soup recipie (or something similar) it definately happens and made me wonder who I can bill for the lost hours/days of my life.
- Somebody read to the end of The Dreamers series?
- BBC Books' last full-length novel based on ''Doctor Who'' featuring the Eighth Doctor sets up a Reset Button to clear the novel continuity out of the way of the new series, but doesn't actually press it. Instead, the book ends on a cliffhanger. Lance Parkin left the door open in case the new series bombed, as the BBC thought it might have done. In which case, novel continuity would have (mostly or completely) ignored the new series continuity.
- The main plot point reversed is the destruction of Gallifrey and the death of almost all of the Time Lords. Which then happens again (by different means) in the Backstory for the new series. Gallifrey is clearly a very unlucky planet.
- The beginning of the book The Toyminator applies the reset button to the main characters so that they'll be exactly as they were when the hollow chocolate bunnies of the apocalypse (not misspelled), the previous book, began. This is only its first problem.
- A Game of Universe features both direct and indirect examples of Reset Buttons. In the direct example, Germain goes back in time seven seconds after losing a magical battle and going to hell. The indirect example comes when an angel reveals that he's been following Germain and traveling back in time every time he dies.
- Done in Animorphs when the gang go back in time to prevent the birth of Visser Four's human host body.
- At the end of the Discworld novel Sourcery, Coin resets the entire Disc, undoing all the damage done by the magical war that had taken place.
- Hey, and what about Johnny and the Bomb, another Pratchett's book? After preventing Blackbury's bombardment and leaving Wobbler in past, when they return they don't know how it was before.
- Jack Chalker's Well World series has a universal (as in, resets the entire universe) reset button in the vast computer known as the Well of Souls. Only one problem: You have to destroy the entire existing universe, effectively killing everyone in it in the process. No wonder the sole remaining guardian tends to wipe his own memory and has to be dragged kicking and screaming back to the Well World to do his job.
- Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising features a large-scale conflict between the Soviet Union and the NATO countries, however a treaty at the end essentially reestablishes the status quo, without any major changes.
- The SF novel Space Chantey by R. A. Lafferty has a literal reset button, called a Dong Button; if you've made a major blunder, you can press the Dong Button to go back and correct your mistake. One scene makes use of the fact that, since losing all your money on an ill-advised gamble is a major mistake, it would be useful to have a Dong Button in a casino, and always make the largest bet you can make.
Live Action TV
- My Name Is Earl sees Earl spending the last of his $100,000 lottery winnings in season 3. At the end of the season, his ex-wife leaves him $75,000 in savings after joining an Amish community, effectively putting Earl back where he started in the beginning of the series.
- Given its dependence on Time Travel, Star Trek can often be found pressing this button. Star Trek Voyager, specifically, may have caused irreparable damage to the entire Trope Console due to its constant, eager pounding of the Reset Button. Character development still continues despite the usage of the reset button on Voyager. In fact, fewer episodes hit the reset button than don't. Most of the episodes that do are time travel episodes.
- Voyager did manage to do it once with style, in the episode "The Year of Hell".
- The Voyager is in fact sometimes referred to as "HMS Reset Button"...
- Oddly enough, one time the writers actually forgot they had pushed the reset button. A time agent is sent back to the 20th century and spends three decades viewed as a crazy bum, until the Voyager crew fixes things and meets him again in younger form, and he has no memory of the former timeline. Later, the agent shows up again and we find out that now he does remember those three decades and has a grudge against Voyager due to causing them.
- This apparently had something to do with some sort of temporal insanity caused by having the proverbial reset button pressed one too many times... or something...
- Most notably, Voyager was located far from Federation space, with no hope of supplies or crew replacement. As such, every episode that has a crew death or major ship damage has an implied reset button between the end and the next episode.
- The episode of My Favorite Martian where Martin's nephew Andromeda ("Andy") shows up, ends with Martin using a time machine as a Reset Button when Andy's success in proving his and Martin's origins starts the neighbors looking for torches and pitchforks.
- A rare example of a Reset Button without Applied Phlebotinum: the fifth season finale of Degrassi The Next Generation undid nearly everything that had happened that season, in order to get things in position for next season. Character relationships that had taken over a dozen episodes to develop undid themselves in less than ten minutes, and characters revealed that they had never really been that way. It was Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends, but also other loose ends.
- In a subversion, the Torchwood Season Finale, "End of Days", features a false climax has the heroes pressing a reset button that fixes everything that's gone wrong earlier in the episode, but in a subversion of the trope, doing causes the son of Satan to physically manifest himself as a gigantic monster who kills thousands of people before the team can stop him.
- Used in the Doctor Who season finale "Last of the Time Lords", wherein an entire year was reset for everyone except the main characters (and, arguably, everyone else on board the Valiant at the time). This only resets half of the two-part story, though, taking them back to just before the midpoint cliffhanger.
- The Ass Pull finale to the Doctor Who TV Movie Backdoor Pilot had the Doctor resurrecting his two dead companions with only Technobabble as an excuse as to how that might have happened.
- Another example appears in "Father's Day", in which Rose rescues her father Pete from dying in a hit-and-run. Problem is, he's supposed to die, and his survival unleashes the Monster Of The Week, which is only defeated by his Heroic Sacrifice, which (arguably) resets the timeline back to its original state.
- A crueller example is that at the end of Series 4 finale "Journey's End". While the rest of the world remembers everything, from the planets to the big flying alien thingies, Donna is relieved of all memories relating to the Doctor as her knowledge of him threatens to kill her. She even reverts back to her original self, poor thing.
- Every time Monk appears to be making progress psychologically, some event in the episode will traumatize him even further. (For example: a blackmailer impersonates Trudy, an actor playing him has a psychotic break...)
- Or something less big. Almost all of the filler-episode progress is undone in the last five minutes of that episode.
- Both 1960s/1970s TV Westerns The Big Valley and Bonanza had the same thing happening, every time a male character in the show got serious with a woman or got married, she got killed off in some gruesome fashion or died of some horrible disease, or in childbirth, on the same episode. (Exception: Hoss' mother on Bonanza lasted two episodes.)
- The pilot of the prematurely canceled remake of Fantasy Island involved a little boy whose fantasy was that his father would turn out to be his favorite superhero. In a very blatant Lampshade Hanging, the boy says that his hero's best superpower is the "reset button" on his video game, which allows him to return from death and undo all his mistakes — which, of course, is how the boy undoes all the trouble his wish has caused at the end of the show.
- A number of times in the Stargate Verse: the Aschen arc, "Unending" and more recently Stargate Atlantis In which Sam Carter, Dr. Keller, Ronon Dex and Teyla all die painfully and a hologram Rodney manages to get Sheppard back from the future to reset the plot. Then a building collapses on several of the characters.
- In "Unending", the Reset Button is an actual button that's pressed near the end of the episode.
- Dallas infamously Ret Conned an entire season into being All Just A Dream.
- Kamen Rider Ryuki ends with a Reset Button. Basically, everyone dies and then comes back for absolutely no reason. Something about Evil Mastermind Kanzaki Shirou somehow going back in time and undoing all the evil he's done.
- In an episode of Wizards of Waverly Place a genie in a lamp comes with a literal reset button.
- After killing off all but one of the entire cast of Witchblade, what else was there to do but turn back time in the first season finale?
- In the Red Dwarf episode White Hole, Lister knocks a planet into the hole to collapse it, causing all time spewed out by it to become null. Kryten explains that the few weeks events leading to this point will not have happened, all the while the decor around them slowly vanishes to a field of stars. Just as the cast themselves are about to vanish, Kryten takes the occasion to tell Rimmer just how much he hates him, ending with a final "Ha!" just as they all get reset back to the start of the episode again.
- Angel pressed the Reset Button and erased the events of the previous 24 hours in the episode "I Will Always Remember You" in order to save Buffy's life. However, as the events erased including Angel becoming human and having a perfect night with Buffy, and that Angel's price for getting the Reset Button pushed was that he alone remembered everything, it became an instant Tear Jerker.
- Debatable price, since it was only mentioned offhand a few times, espescially after that specific episode, and then the series pretended it never happened and as of season 2 Angel actively sought humanity even though the same terms would still apply, to the point where at the end of the series, Angel claims to have forgotten what it's like to be human, even though he spent almost 24 hours as a human only five years earlier. One would think after centuries of vampirism, such an experience would have a lasting impression.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer does this at least twice:
- In the season one episode "Nightmares", everyone's nightmares start to come true, but the effects are erased at the end of the episode. A debatable example, as the Scoobies retain a perfect memory of what happened.
- A more definite example is the season three episode "The Wish". Cordelia makes a wish that propels the show into an Alternate Universe where the vampires have their run of Sunnydale. At the end, Giles destroys the Mac Guffin that allowed the demon Anyanka to do this. The only character who remembers anything is Anyanka herself, who becomes human.
- Cory in the House features a literal Big Red reset button. Established as a Chekhovs Gun early on. Given that it's sole appearance was in a Dream Episode, there wasn't much of a mystery as to what it was.
- Happens once in Big Wolf on Campus.
- In the Smallville season 8 episode "Infamous", Clark's use of a Reset Button is referenced by trope name.
- Despite setting out to avert this trope, the conclusion to Battlestar Galactica's New Caprica arc at the beginning of Season 3 served as a Reset Button of sorts by killing off the Pegasus as quick as it could and resetting the show to as it was in Season 1, losing its momentum in many almost irrelevent standalones.
- In the Heroes third Volume Villains, some of the characters referred to Hiro as their reset button in case anything went wrong in their battle against Arthur. Unfortunately, Arthur got to him first and regressed him mentally to 10 years old.
Video Games
- Xenosaga made this a central plot point in the third game Thus Spoke Zarathustra and ultimate goal of the Big Bad. Wilhelm intended to use an artifact to reset time so the Universe wouldn't be destroyed by spatial expansion.
- Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time has the both the Sands themselves and the Dagger of Time, a (very) short-time reset button that allowed a player to undo huge mistakes like falling into a death trap, or taking a major beating in a fight. As well, the events of the entire game end up being reset by the end, and in the end movie the Prince uses the Dagger one last time to undo kissing the woman he fell in love with during the erased timeline, who slapped him for doing so while having "just" met her. In a unique variation, the Reset Button mechanism itself sets off the events of the second game, as the Powers That Be are out to punish the Prince for using it.
- And it goes on... the time manipulations of the second game (erasing the existence of the Sands of Time) enable the third game to happen, as they result in the Vizier never being killed by the Prince during the first one. At the end of the third game when the Prince finds his dead father and his dark side taunts him to find some way to rewind time again, he vows to take responsibility for his actions and refuses to hit the button again.
- Final Fantasy V had a Time spell called Return or Reset (depending on which version) that you could use during combat to rewind to the beginning of the fight. This spell was very favorable to the player— it would also reset the battle condition. So, for example, if the battle began as an Ambush attack, the player could use this spell and the battle condition would most likely to be changed to a normal battle or even a preemptive attack. Also, it cost only 1 MP.
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2006: Used at the very end, though it's suggested that Sonic and Elise still remember each other vaguely.
- Sadly, they didn't do it well enough, it seems, as people are still arguing over the Plot Hole involving Blaze. Nevermind that Rush Adventure completely disregards that game, granted, there's Rivals, but considering how the first Rivals game has no definitive ending, this is questionable at best.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, The Reset Button is one of the central gameplay elements. Link only has three days to save Termina — if he runs out of time, he has to play the Song of Time to go back to the first day, and everything that has happened to the world or the characters is reset.
- This troper can't finish Majora's Mask by reason of what I'm sure is some kind of disorder; I have trouble accepting that these people are just collections of pixels and programming, and even though I retain the rewards for completing a task such as driving off the aliens that are stealing Romani Ranch's cows, the fact that having to reset things unsaves the damn cows and leaves the girls distraught again completely spazzes me out, because A) I went to so much trouble to DO it and B) oh look, those damn pirates have the Zora eggs again. It's so wonderful being me, some days.
- Just get every mask and then do everything on your last cycle. It is possible to get all the story heavy quests done in one go. Just remember that going straight for the boss undoes all the damage they have done.
- Parodied in Grand Theft Auto 3's ingame radio chat show channel Chatterbox, in which, while discussing video games, ironically, the show's host Lazlow and a caller get to the concept of reset buttons. The caller says "Life does not have a Reset Button" to which Lazlow responds that the show does and proceeds to prove his point by pressing said button. Since the game disc can only hold so much, the radio show must keep repeating the same things. The Reset Button on the show just explains that away easy.
- Lufia II gives Maxim the Reset spell, which lets him reset a puzzle room to prevent you from getting stuck if you screw up a difficult puzzle.
- The second Ar Tonelico has a Song Magic called the Reset Button. It resets the battle. Supposedly, you use it to reset bad things that might happen in battle, but there's really no point... And then later on, weird things happen to the Reset Button in its so-called "upgrades".
Web Comics
- Done literally here◊.
- The Order of the Stick, strip #570.
- Spells and Whistles has reset itself several times while finding its own unique artistic style (the first such occurrence caused by a cease-and-decist from PVP Online) and eventually went on to intentionally keep on hitting the reset button as part of the story narrative. An alternate main character breaks out of her doomed comic universe to hunt down those she feels are responsible for her life coming undone.
- MSF High: Not totally, but at the end of the day, all injuries heal, the dead rise, and transformed students can choose to change back or keep the new form forever.
Western Animation
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