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Rubber-Band History

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Harvey: All modern research points to the elasticity of time, rather than a brittle framework.
Crichton: Can it be corrected?
Harvey: If nudged closely enough to course, events have a way of restructuring themselves. If the participants are the same, the venue's the same, the motivation's the same, then well: the outcome is likely to be the same.

Rubber-Band History is the phenomenon where a story begins in an Alternate History but ends with the usual timeline having been restored. History, apparently, is like a giant rubber band: you can stretch it and twist it, but sooner or later it will spring back into its original form, and the more radical the change the nastier the Snap Back will be.

Sometimes, the resident Alternate Badass of said timeline will come back if the alternate timeline threatens to become dominant again. Don't expect them to stick around, though.

This trope is easiest to grasp in the context of a series, where an episode starts with a radically different version of reality that sooner or later snaps back into the version established in earlier episodes. But it can also be seen in standalone works, where it's the timeline snapping back to "real" history — ie. the version of reality familiar to the author and the audience. (In the latter case, it's often implied that in-universe the unfamiliar timeline is the original one and the change to our reality is a new alteration and not a reversion to a previous state; that still counts.)

If history can't be brought back to its original form without some major differences, it's a Close-Enough Timeline — like when Alice escapes death, but our heroes make sure she gets run over by a truck a few minutes later anyway. If Alice's tomb is instead filled by Bob just to preserve the timeline, it's Tricked Out Time. Not related to the "rubberband" timeline for Long Runners where characters don't age; that's Comic-Book Time. Compare In Spite of a Nail.


Examples:

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    Comic Books 
  • Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602 is set in a timeline in which the heroes and villains of the Marvel Comics Universe begin to appear 400 years early. In the end, the disrupting factor is identified and dealt with, and the history of the Marvel Universe is restored to normal (although the 1602 timeline survives in a pocket universe). And as Spider-Man 1602 shows that pocket universe will eventually shift back to established history with WWII and the creation of Captain America.
  • In Wonder Woman: Odyssey, where the timeline has been drastically altered, this is Justified by the strands of fate. The original timeline is still woven and can likewise be returned to as it was. It was then subverted by Flashpoint happening right when Diana had done what was needed to restore the timeline which destroyed the previous continuity through time travel shenanigans and left a drastically altered and Darker and Edgier Wonder Woman and the Amazons in its wake.

    Fan Works 
  • In "Empty Graves", part of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Hearts series, Martha Kent has to deal with a succession of time-traveling assassins attempting to kill Clark Kent while he's still young and relatively defenseless. Each time traveler is from a different future which ceases to exist as a result of their actions — for instance, one of the first is from a future where Jonathan and Martha kept Clark isolated on the farm for fear of what might happen if his origins were discovered, with the result that he grew up emotionally isolated from humanity and became a tyrannical overlord; having seen how that will turn out, Martha decides to risk letting Clark go to school and make friends, and that future is averted. After several such adjustments, the final time-traveling villain is from the familiar-to-the-reader timeline in which Clark grows up to become Superman.
  • The Power Rangers fic "Forever Yellow" observes that chronal energy generated by time travellers can impact the memories of those with brief contact with visitors to the past, although it is still possible to change history if people spend a prolonged time in the past. As a result, for some time the assembled team of Yellow Rangers (operating around the time of Power Rangers Samurai) have to deal with opponents from the future where Venjix has conquered the world, but when they travel back in time to recruit Trini and Tanya from the past for additional firepower, the other Rangers won't retain any memory of the original brief visit, although Trini and Tanya still need to have their memories erased once the crisis is over.
  • Brother on Brother, Daughter on Mother argues that time in Star Trek has an inertia-like property that causes small alterations in the timeline to be papered over as history proceeds, resulting in a Close-Enough Timeline. However, major alterations split off Alternate Timelines that weaken the overall timestream, which can cause entire timelines and everything in them to disappear altogether. This is compared to a rope fraying.

    Films — Live-Action 

    Literature 
  • K.A. Applegate's Animorphs did this a couple times. In Elfangor's Secret, a rogue Yeerk discovers a way of changing history, and sets about undermining Earth's past to make it easier to conquer. The book opens in the timeline created by his interference, with the protagonists unaware that this is not how history has always been until a Sufficiently Advanced Alien steps in and grants them Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, after which they pursue the Yeerk to restore history to normal.
  • Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity is set in the future, but it gradually becomes apparent that it's the future of a different past than our own. It ends with our history being created by a change in the past, when the time-traveling protagonists derail the sequence of events that would have led to the founding of Eternity.
  • In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, the time travel shenanigans result in several changes to history which result in the timeline we're familiar with, where the coelacanth survived to the 20th century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge never finished writing down "Kubla Khan", and Johann Sebastian Bach is the world's most famous and prolific Baroque composer.
  • The Thursday Next books are set in an alternate history which gradually becomes more like our own over the course of the series, through two main mechanisms:
    • A technology exists by which people can enter the world of a work of fiction and, potentially, affect the course of the story. In The Eyre Affair, the novel Jane Eyre initially has a different ending from the one in 'our' world. However, due to the exploits of the heroine and the events of the final climax taking place within the novel's original manuscript, the ending gets changed to the ending it does have in our world - something which everyone greatly approves of, since in that history the novel's 'original' ending was widely accepted to be depressing and dramatically unsatisfying. For added Mind Screw, the fifth book, First Amongst Sequels, does the same thing with the Thursday Next books themselves.
    • Thursday's father, a rogue Time Police officer, spends much of the first four books bouncing around history and setting events right, and events after his intervention more closely resemble Real Life history. However, eventually time travel itself is retroactively never invented, and that still leaves the Thursday Next world with a past, present, and future wildly different from our own.
  • In James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation, the original timeline is one in which World War II never happened and the Nazis faded to obscurity after the Beer Hall Putsch. Some 21st century aristocrats go back to the 1920s and give Hitler funding and technology with the intent of moving in and taking over after he conquers the world for them. He takes what they offer, gives them the finger, and proceeds to take over just about the entire planet. An American team from that world's 1970s are able to go back to 1939 and sabotage the Nazis' time gate, and the uptime information they bring back is used by the Allied leaders to launch Operation Overlord and create our timeline.
  • Ward Moore's novel Bring the Jubilee begins in a timeline where the Confederacy won the American Civil War; the main character goes back in time to observe Gettysburg and accidentally changes history to our version.
  • Lawrence Watt-Evans' short story "One-Shot" has a guy go back in time to save Kennedy from being killed by a love-sick Marilyn Monroe. He drugs her and makes it look like a suicide. The Secret Service agent he confesses and proves his story to says he'll tell JFK about it after he gets back from Dallas.
  • Times Without Number by John Brunner is a collection of short stories set in an alternate history where the Spanish Armada conquered England and the resultant European superpower went on to invent time travel. In the final story, an extremist travels back in time to sabotage the Armada; despite the hero's efforts, he succeeds, creating the history we're familiar with.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Andromeda: "The Unconquerable Man" depicts an alternative timeline in which Dylan Hunt is killed during the events of the first episode, and Gaheris Rhade survives. At the end of the episode, faced with disaster, Rhade travels back in time and sacrifices himself to secure Hunt's survival, creating the main timeline of the series. Unlike most versions of this trope, the episode doesn't begin in the alternate timeline, but instead with a scene of main-timeline-Hunt discovering a surviving trace of the old timeline, before going into a whole episode flashback.
  • Doctor Who:
    • "Father's Day": Rose persuades the Doctor to take her to see her father, Pete, who died when she was young. She winds up saving his life. As a result, three points of history are changed without any adverse effect: Pete's death is witnessed, he doesn't die alone, and the driver who hit him stops and turns himself in to the police. In fact, there are indications that if Rose had saved Pete the first time, the change might've gone OK. It was doing it while her and the Doctor's earlier selves were there that messed up the timeline beyond the limit. Plus, when the Doctor is trying to summon the TARDIS into the church, he seems pretty sure that he can fix it so the Reapers will go away without Pete having to die. Of course that was before Pete gave Baby Rose to Adult Rose, letting the Reapers invade the church and kill the Doctor and cause the TARDIS to vanish.
    • "Bad Wolf" subverts it: On his last trip to this era, 100 years before in "The Long Game", the Doctor was confident that, after the defeat of the Jagrafess, the correct course of human history would reassert itself. It turns out that the confusion caused by those events gave the Jagrafess' secret bosses, the Daleks, even more power to turn Earth into an even worse Crapsack World.
    • "Vincent and The Doctor": Tragically becomes the case when they are unable to alter Van Gogh's suicide beyond giving him one additional positive memory. He's still the same man at the end of the day and you can't change someone's fate that easily.
  • The 1st season finale of Eureka is set 4 years in the future. Things seem normal until an unexplainable body materializes in Section 5, followed by events from the past 4 years (such as a runaway tornado) popping up all over town. Turns out someone used Mental Time Travel to change an event in the past and the "real" timeline is bleeding through trying to reassert itself. Time traveling again to prevent the original change is the only way to stop a cataclysmic collapse of both timelines.
  • Farscape. Discussed between John Crichton and Harvey in "...Different Destinations". However every attempt by John Crichton to nudge events back the way they were only makes things worse, and he has to settle for a Close-Enough Timeline in which a devastating war is averted but a massacre of innocent civilians takes place.
  • Legends of Tomorrow:
  • Quantum Leap:
    • In the episode "Lee Harvey Oswald", Sam leaps into the title character, and Sam and Al have to decide whether the purpose of the leap is to shoot Kennedy, not shoot Kennedy, or something else entirely, since Oswald might not have been the assassin at all. It turns out that Oswald was the only shooter, no grassy knoll; the mission is to save Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy, who "originally" died in the shooting.
    • In the episode "Goodbye, Norma Jean", Sam leaps into Marilyn Monroe's chauffeur. The episode ends with Sam preventing her death from a drug overdose, keeping her alive long enough to make The Misfits.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds provides this as the explanation for the Eugenics Wars, the franchise's most infamous Continuity Snarl. In the episode Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, a time traveling Romulan saboteur explains that the presence of so many time travelers interfering in Earth's history should be making a much greater impact, but for some reason particularly major events simply cannot be removed from the timeline without extreme effort. Thus, despite Khan Noonien Singh originally starting the Eugenics Wars in the '90s, he's now only a child by the late 2020's or early 2030's. His reign of terror may not happen at the same time, but it's too important not to happen.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In "Year of Hell", Krenim leader Annorax complains that it feels like time itself is fighting him in his efforts to alter history to bring his country Back from the Brink and his wife Back from the Dead (she was Ret-Gone as an unintended consequence of his first attempt at the former). In the end, Janeway rams his timeship, causing it to erase itself from history and thereby return all his alterations to their OEM settings.

    Video Games 
  • Fate Series: There are multiple timelines in the verse, and the history in each naturally branches based on decisions/different happenstances that may occur. The "rubber band" here exists in the name of "Quantum Time-Lock" —a phenomenon where the world (which is a sentient being in this verse) decides that things that happen in a particular time and/or in a particular place is immutable. One can theoretically change the past events that led to the event that was secured by Quantum Time-Lock, but that past will inevitably be "corrected" so that it will fit the secured event in some way. To actually overwrite a Quantum Time-Lock without the "rubber band" coming into effect requires a massive amount of energy to pull off.
  • The Tale of Food: It is stated that it's impossible to change history, despite the constant time-travel to recruit food spirits.

    Web Comics 
  • Oddball variation: In Irregular Webcomic!, the Indiana Jones parody strips feature Hitler as a Brain in a Jar - to circumvent the fact that the LEGO Group doesn't produce Hitler figures. This is later explained as the result of a change from yet another alternate history where Hitler died in the Reichstag fire. He was brought back in the jar by Adam Savage of the MythBusters as part of Chess with Death (specifically, a bet that Adam couldn't confirm the myth that Hitler's brain was saved in a jar... hey.)

    Western Animation 
  • The Danger Mouse episode "Once Upon A Timeslip" has some fun with this. When the narrator mentions the time is 12:15, an anomaly suddenly transports the cast to the year 1215 to act out a Robin Hood story. The narrator is first baffled but then reasons the change of pace is a good thing. He gets so caught up in his narration (in iambic pentameter) things deteriorate in a hurry. Fed up, Danger Mouse interrupts with "A timeslip occurred and transported them all back to the twentieth century and out of this mess!," which the narrator repeats. It sends everyone back to the present (for 1984, anyway). DM and Penfold do the closing announcements as the narrator gets taken away for a long rest.
  • Freakazoid! had the episode "Freakazoid Is History!," where the hero gets sucked into a time vortex and goes back to 1941 where he successfully averts America's involvement in World War II. He returns to the present to see "what Freak hath wrought." Among them: Rush Limbaugh is now a bleeding heart liberal, Sharon Stone can act, Euro-Disney is a success, cold fusion works, no more Chevy Chase movies...and the Brain is now the country's president.


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