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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 Loop 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 Loop 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
Anime and Manga
- The plot of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni once the protagonists realize that they've been trapped in a Groundhog Day Loop of murder, insanity and betrayal. Rika and Hanyuu knew from the beginning, and were trying to save the town, but eventually nearly gave up.
- Generator Gawl seems to fall into this category, seeing how The only reason Auge was able to take over was because Gawl, Koji, and Ryu went back in time to stop them. In the end Ryu was the one who created the include cells and gave Auge the ability to take over, which is what caused them to go back in the first place. Ouch, I think my brain just exploded.
- An attempt at this is the driving force behind the Myth Arc of Rave Master. The series inverts the trope because changing history back to the way it was is the bad guys' plan, as the original timeline's world was utterly destroyed save one survivor, who was able to change history to create the Rave world. On top of the Eldritch Clock Roach out to undo the paradox involved, most of the late-story baddies want to see the "false" world destroyed.
Film
- 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.
- The two time travelers in each of the Terminator films are each trying to set right the wrong the other one caused.
Literature
- The Care Taker Trilogy focuses on people from a future where the world's ecosystem has been ruined coming back to the present: the "Turning Point", or the point at which it was theorized to still be possible to reverse the damage done. Their foes, who actually like the future as it is, also come back, with the aim of speeding up the damage, and ensuring their own victory.
Live Action TV
- 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".
- Appears to be the premise of the
new lamentably late NBC series Journeyman.
- 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...
- Odyssey 5, where a Five Man Band witnesses the destruction of Earth from a space shuttle and are sent back in time five years by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens to prevent it. Although they promise not to change events, each of them can't resist meddling with their past to make it better. For instance one woman who knows her son will die of cancer starts giving him a potentially dangerous preventative drug — her husband, convinced she's going insane, cuts off her access to the boy. Another character bets on a football game — the size of his bet leads to other people betting on the outcome, starting rumors that aversely affect the course of the game. Worse, the group have consider the possibility that their own actions might advance in time, or even cause, the destruction of Earth.
- The TropeNamer, QuantumLeap's entire plot was a series of these
Music
- L. Udo's The Broken Bride rock opera centers on a scientist (more of the grieved than mad variety) who spends fifteen years building a time machine to return to the day his wife died in a car accident.
Video Games
- 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.
- 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.
- This is the premise of the fan-made Marathon Game Mod Marathon: Eternal. Earth is devasted by an interstellar war, and the hero is sent back in time to ensure that Humanity wins. Avoids a Temporal Paradox becuase the Lost Technology doing the time traveling can also jump between different dimensions - the plan is to create an alternate timeline where Earth isn't destroyed and transport the refugees from the original Earth there.
Western Animation
Episode or Character Plots
Anime and Manga
- 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)
- Although it seems perfectly okay for them to change history in some cases but not in others. In one early episode, our heroes help a struggling musician make it to a gig which he had missed in the original timeline. He's convinced that had he not missed this gig, he'd be a star in the present. Turns out he's still a nobody even after they change history; the only difference is that he no longer blames himself for the breakup of his band. Since the change was so unimportant, our heroes are informed that what they did was okay.
- 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 Mahou Sensei Negima manga, this is strongly implied to be Chao Lingshen's motivation for her plot to rip open the local Mages' Masquerade.
- Subverted in DragonballZ. Future Trunks 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 still wants to help out, hoping to create at least one peaceful world, and to return to his own time strong enough to finally stop what he wanted to prevent.
- Archer in Fate Stay Night attempts to do this by creating a Temporal Paradox.
- A great part of the Suzumiya Haruhi light novels deals with Kyon trying to rectify past events in order not to let Haurhi's powers go haywire—or so it seems.
- Yakitate Japan: Kazuma's last bread of the second Tournament Arc is so amazingly delicious, it sends the judge back in time to RetCon his own mother's death.
- In the Non Serial Movie of Kamen Rider Kiva, King of Hell Castle, Wataru goes back in time in order to prevent a prison inmate from discovering the ruins of an ancient demon race and becoming their king. Unfortunately, his actions don't make any real difference, and in fact may have made it worse, given that when he returns to 2008, the creatures are roaming freely and the moon is covered by a gigantic monster eyeball.
Comic Books
- 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. 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.
- In the "Camelot Falls" storyline in the Superman comics, a prophetic sorcerer tells him what he needs to do to avert the extinction of humanity years down the line. In a subversion (?) of this trope, Superman refuses to comply, namely because "what he needs to do" involves not preventing the deaths of countless innocent.
Film
- In Galaxy Quest, the "Omega 13" device is used to go back 13 seconds in time, "enough to change a single mistake".
- 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...)
- 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.
Literature
- In Elfangor's Secret, the team is sent back to prevent Visser Four from changing key events in the past. Unfortunately, those changes were much more far-reaching than either side anticipated, and would've prevented the Holocaust, though likely still making a worse future. So in order to return the present to normal, the team has to essentially condemn millions to death. Eventually they decide on paradoxing out the events of the novel, deciding that at least this way it happened naturally.
- And then again (before, really) in In the Time of the Dinosaurs, they must sabotage a nuclear device and sacrifice an entire colony of aliens, or else the Cretaceous Era won't end on schedule.
- 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.
Live Action TV
- 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).
- Not really. In Lost's universe You Cant Fight Fate, so Desmond ends up making the same decision he made the first time around. All of which happens in flashback before the third season.
- Or Can You? In The Variable, Faraday says he now thinks that the future can be altered, and goes about doing that until killed by his mom, who in the future sent the island and his past ... which sort of undercuts his point.
- 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.
- 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.
- Guinan of Star Trek The Next Generation is practically this trope walking personified, especially in "Yesterday's Enterprise".
- 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.
- Supernatural has an episode that Dean thinks is a Set Right What Once Went Wrong, but not only does it turn out he was only meant to witness What Went Wrong and not change it, it sure looks like he actually caused it.
- Which would make his dislike of Sam's powers just a little hypocritical. Or possibly guilt inspired...
Machinima
- 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 fucktard!"). 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.
Video Games
- 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.
- In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: 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.
- 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.
- The world of "Dragon Quest VII'' used to be a vast and expansive place, but by the time of the game, it has been reduced to a single continent. Your party's mission is to travel back in time to the continents which once existed in the past and stop the various disasters which destroyed them, thereby causing them to reappear in the present.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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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