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Set Right What Once Went Wrong
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alt title(s): Set Right What Once Was Wrong The character receives foreknowledge of what will happen (or, if Time Travel is involved, Ripple Effect Proof Memory will allow them to remember what happened "the first time around") and has to correct it.
Constitutes the plot of nearly every episode of Quantum Leap (from which this title was taken), Early Edition, Seven Days, and Tru Calling, as well as a majority of episodes of The Dead Zone, and numerous individual episodes of other shows. Can form the arc of a whole series, as in Heroes.
Distinguished from Groundhog Day by:
- The character's knowledge of what needs to be corrected prior to the first time through, and
- Usually only one attempt to correct it is necessary or in fact possible
Combinations of Groundhog Day and Set Right What Once Went Wrong are possible, however, and have been used on occasion: see for example "The Siege" on The Dead Zone, the Tru Calling episode "The Longest Day", Early Edition's "Run, Gary, Run." In fact, this combination is the entire premise of Day Break.
Sometimes, trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong is what sets everything wrong in the first place, resulting in a Stable Time Loop. Succeeding would create a Temporal Paradox.
Often the adventurer has to travel to fix things, combining this premise with Adventure Towns.
Note: World War II did not go wrong. Traveling there will only make it worse.
Examples
Series Plots
- Tru Calling: Tru does this in almost every episode. A number of twists and variations of the trope are also used.
- This was also the plot for the entire Voyagers! series where Phineas and Jeffrey would travel through time to "give history a little nudge".
- The plot of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni once the protagonists realize that they've been trapped in a Groundhog Day of murder, insanity and betrayal. Rika and Hanyuu knew from the beginning, and were trying to save the town, but eventually nearly gave up.
- Appears to be the premise of the
new lamentably late NBC series Journeyman.
- "Now the fool seeks to return to the past, and undo the future that is Aku..."
- Basically the whole premise of Daikatana, although the main characters spend so much time screwing around in the mythic past that one could be forgiven for thinking it was otherwise.
- Naturally, Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes have played with this: in Sam's case, it was finding out why his father abandoned him, as well as arresting the serial killer who'd kidnapped his girlfriend and a crime lord who'd had a witness in his custody murdered; in Alex's, it was preventing her parents' death by car bomb. Their success rates are... varied; Sam eventually wound up convincing his father to skip town, because there was that little matter of a murder and racketeering charge if he stayed...
- This trope is the entire purpose of the game Time Hollow, where the main character is completely normal except that he can use his "Hollow Pen" to make a window into the past and alter an event.
- Cyborg 2087. In the far future, a mind-control invention has been abused to create a police state controlled by cyborgs. Garth, a good guy cyborg, travels back to 1966 to convince the invention's creator to keep it secret and thus change the future.
Episode or Character Plots
- This is Desmond's major character motivation throughout the third season of Lost (apart from his desire to be reunited with his lost love Penny).
- Subverted in Farscape in an episode where the team go back in time to a historic siege and make things worse by getting everyone except them killed.
- The Fairly OddParents, episode "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker". Timmy's attempts to stop his teacher from growing up to become a fairy-obsessed maniac result in him lamenting, "NO! This is exactly what I was trying to prevent!"
- In Galaxy Quest, the "Omega 13" device is used to go back 13 seconds in time, "enough to change a single mistake".
- In the 90's X-Men animated series, Bishop traveled from the future to the present on three separate occasions to prevent a Sentinel-ruled dystopia from coming to pass. On the second trip, Cable travels from even further in the future to stop Bishop from inadvertently making the far future worse.
- Back To The Future The Animated Series: "Go Fly A Kite". Verne accidentally interrupts Benjamin Franklin's famous kite experiment, causing the electricity in present day Hill Valley to disappear. Doc and Marty must head back to 1752 and simulate a storm in order for Franklin to make his discovery.
- Not-quite-subverted in Doctor Who: "Genesis of the Daleks". The Time Lords send the Doctor back in time to the creation of the Daleks, with the goal of either preventing their creation, or at least making them less aggressive. While there, the Doctor is captured by the Daleks' creator and is made to detail every Dalek vulnerability he knows about. Being the universe's resident expert on fighting Daleks, this would have been a catastrophe had he not destroyed the tape before leaving the scene.
- Kamen Rider Den-O touches on this occasionally, in the context of "You are not supposed to do this". Kintauros nearly gets kicked off DenLiner in one episode when he tries to change a girls past for the better instead of dealing with the Monster Of The Week (who was damaging the timeline himself in the meantime)
- Subverted later on when it's discovered Sakurai and Airi broke time on purpose, in order to hide their unborn child from the Imagin.
- In the novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, Lily gets sent back in time to prevent a blight from wiping out humanity, but after she succeeds she decides she liked the blighted future better and becomes a supervillain to try to bring back her original future. However, this turns out to be an outright lie — she's a native of the current time period, although the era she claims as her origin really is a possible future that she has visited — and she ends up using it to trick another supervillain into saving the world.
- Red vs. Blue uses the "Stable Time Loop" variety of this trope. When Church is blasted into the past by a nuclear explosion, he uses the opportunity to try and correct each disaster that has occurred in the series up to that point. Of course, it turns out he’s the cause of most of them, including his CO's mysterious heart failure, numerous injuries to his teammates, and his own accidental death ("Oh my god! I’m the team-killing ***tard!"). When his every attempt to prevent the bomb from going off fails, he eventually gives up, makes sure a copy of himself is blasted into the future with his teammates, and delivers a bitter Aesop about accepting reality as it is.
- On the other hand, he manages to save everybody. More than most of the cast can say.
- In the Mahou Sensei Negima manga, this is strongly implied to be Chao Lingshen's motivation for her plot to rip open the local Mages' Masquerade.
- In the MMORPG City Of Heroes, several factions are attempting to do this, but their concepts of "right", usually focusing on self-preservation, are often mutually exclusive.
- Viciously subverted by the film The Butterfly Effect, in which every time the main character goes back in time to fix something the titular concept conspires to make things worse for everyone. This occurs repeatedly with all kinds of nastiness happening along the way, culminating in an inevitable Downer Ending the exact nature of which depends whether you're watching the theatrical release or the director's cut.
- In the film Split Infinity, financially-minded teenager Amelia Jean falls from a barn loft and wakes up as her own late (by her time) great aunt for whom she was named. She tries to prevent her brother/grandfather from losing everything to the impending Black Tuesday. She succeeds only in learning a lesson about what's really important, and setting things in motion that would cause them to be the way they would be by her time. (And quite possibly confusing her great aunt when she returned to her own time...)
- Subverted by Future Trunks from Dragonball also attemps to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, but he does this in a timeline not his own (since in DBZ every timeline counts as another dimension, any changes made in the current time will not directly effect Future Trunks' past or future). He is nice enough to help the cast though and as a plus he returned to his own time strong enough to finally stop what he wanted to prevent.
- Rayek from Elf Quest travels to the future in an attempt to 'save' his space-travelling ancestors from being thrown back in time and crashing on the planet. Unfortunately, all their descendants currently living on this planet will then cease to exist - and will never have existed, since their ancestors will never have set foot on the planet in the first place. Although, in his defense he had a way to save them. Opinions about whether or not this is a good thing differ - he thinks it's good, everyone else thinks it's bad. Who cares about other men's opinion anyway.
- Those people that would cease to exist conveniently include the lifemate of Rayek's one true love (other than himself). Predictably, she is not too happy with his actions, and attacks him, the only point in the entire series where she users her healing magic to harm somebody.
- In PokémonMysteryDungeon: Explorers of Time and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness, before ending up in the past with amnesia the player character was part of a team that has come from the future to prevent time from stopping. Succeeding in the mission causes a Temporal Paradox, causing both you and everyone met in the future to cease to exist. Except then the partner you met at the beginning of the game angsts until Dialga decides you do get to exist after all.
- Subverted numerous times in the Prince Of Persia series. In fact, these subversions are the driving force for much of the Prince's story.
- Played straight in "Ok At The Gunfight Carol" episode of Captain Planet: Hoggish Greedy & Sly Sludge,travel back to the Old West to get the deeds for the Grand Canyon turning it a landfill. The Planeeters follow and work things back on track returning the Grand Canyon to it's natural state.
- In Chrono Trigger the characters end up warped to After The End and, upon watching a video of The End itself, resolve to stop it happening.
- They only have one chance because, well, they die if they don't do it right.
- Guainan of Star Trek The Next Generation is practically this trope walking personified, especially in Yesterday's Enterprise.
- Archer in Fate Stay Night attempts to do this by creating a Temporal Paradox.
- Played completely straight in Schlock Mercenary, right down to the "only one chance."
- Done in a very interesting way in Frequency. The son saves his father's life in the past, which causes a serial killer's life to be saved who would otherwise have died, who ends up killing the mother. The rest of the movie revolves around using the link-to-the-past radio to try to stop him, with an incredible climactic resolution that you just have to see for yourself.
- The Outer Limits TOS episode "The Man Who Was Never Born". A mutant from a devastated future goes back in time to prevent the biological disaster that destroyed civilization.
- Danny Phantom promises not to allow his evil future to come to pass after seeing himself as a sadistic, mass-murdering sociopath. Although Clockwork helps, the subversion comes when it's hinted at the end that it may just be a matter of time after all, if with different circumstances.
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