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Set Right What Once Went Wrong
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alt title(s): Set Right What Once Was Wrong; Setting Right What Once Went 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. When the purpose of the time travel is to save a person (but not alter the timeline) by pulling the person out of time, it's a Time Travel Escape.
Often the adventurer has to travel to fix things, combining this premise with Adventure Towns.
Contrast Make Wrong What Once Went Right, where the time traveler acts for either selfish purposes or because they're living on Crazy Street.
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.
- The premise of Flint the Time Detective. The Time Shifters got scattered throughout history, changing the way certain historical events played out, and the Time Detectives have to captured them and put the past back the way it was.
Comics
Film
- In Triangle this is what Jess tries to do after she realized she's in a Groundhog Day Loop. But it only created another timeline which we don't see completely in the movie.
- Most of the Back to the Future sequels: the second one begins with Doc taking Marty to the future to stop his son from getting arrested, and then having to go into the past to stop Biff from giving his past self the sports almanac. The third movie has Marty go back to 1885 to stop Doc from getting shot by Buford Tannen.
- 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.
- The film Frequency is about a man who can communicate with his dead father through a family ham radio thanks to an Aurora Borealis that appeared in the same timespan between 1969 and current-day 1999. He uses this communication to save his father from his impending death in a warehouse fire, but that sets off a chain of events that lead to his mother's death, so the two work together to fix that, but then...et al.
Literature
- Teresa Edgerton's Celydonn books, specifically The Grail and the Ring, have an interesting take on this. Strictly speaking, Time Travel is not possible. However, Functional Magic allows one to travel to the Inner Celydonn, to a shadow of the past, where one can see what really happened if one doesn't try to derail events. This quasi-Time Travel is used to find out What Once Went Wrong, so that it can be Set Right in the present, thus avoiding any Temporal Paradoxes.
- 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.
- A Christmas Carol has this with the Ghost of Christmas Future warning of the deaths of both Tiny Tim and Scrooge, which Scrooge then fixes thanks to Scare Em Straight.
- In Mergers by Steven L. Layne, the titular Mergers must go back in time to make sure that a man named Michael Quinn dies as a young boy.The reason why is that Senator Broogue went back in time before the Mergers were born and saved Michael from dying, thus causing the creation of a society with only one race. Somewhat different from the usual situation, in that usually it is the opposite(them saving the person).
- Throughout the early Nightside series, John Taylor is pursued by the Harrowing, constructs sent from an After The End future to kill him before he can begin investigating the Nightside's origins. A bit of a subversion, as it's implied the constructs' creators are motivated as much by bitterness and revenge as a need to avert What Went Wrong; else, they could've just sent someone to tell John his investigation would kick off an apocalypse, so he'd turn down the case.
- The protagonist of Jack Chalker's Downtiming The Nightside is forced to choose sides in a temporal war. Naturally, both sides claim to be battling those who would Make Wrong What Once Went Right in order to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
Live Action TV
- The TropeNamer, Quantum Leap's entire plot was a series of these.
- 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.
- In the Mirror, Mirror series, there is exactly one person who was trained to do this exactly once, as revealed in the final episode. Everything prior to this point had already happened in her mentor's past.
- In Babylon 5, this is a key point in the 5 year plot — instead of "Sometimes, trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong is what sets everything wrong in the first place, resulting in a Stable Time Loop.", everything will go wrong unless the heroes go back to keep what's right, creating a Stable Time Loop by altering the past to what it is. Which gets really confusing if you try to ask, "What happened the first time?".
- There are a few hints via dreams and a broadcast. It's said the Shadow's army would of been three times large and more prone to act directly earlier.
- Seven Days is entirely about this trope: a time machine allows a government agent to go seven days back in time in order to prevent the catastrophe of the week from taking place.
- The main plot of the first three seasons of Heroes, though this is more of a case of Set Right What Will Go Wrong.
- More of a case of 'Set right what we messed up' but in an episode of Hannah Montana, Miley and Jackson travel back in time and mess up their parents meeting. Cue a back to the future style disappearance for Jackson as Miley tries to set things right. It was probably All Just A Dream.
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 devastated by an interstellar war, and the hero is sent back in time to ensure that Humanity wins. Avoids a Temporal Paradox because 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.
- We learn in the end of Arc The Lad 2 that It was the reason behind Arc's father disappearance: he tried to set things right, and failed
Western Animation
- "Now the fool seeks to return to the past, and undo the future that is Aku..."
- Partially subverted in that, within the run of the original series, Jack never did return to his original time and stop Aku from taking over the world. He's always trying, but he's more often than not just fighting Aku's dystopia and helping people survive. A future film adaptation may play this trope straight.
- The Peabody and Sherman segments of Rocky And Bullwinkle involve going back in time to correct historical events which have gone wrong.
- Time Squad. However, all of these changes are comedic and none ever cause a bad future. They just have to be fixed.
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 Dragonball Z. Future Trunks also attempts 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 Haruhi'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 ElfQuest 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.
- The mission of Samaritan in Astro City. He actually did set things right before the series started, but now his own time period has changed beyond recognition.
- Cable from Marvel Comics has apparently set as his ultimate goal to set right everything that went wrong, like preventing Apocalypse from waking up. (He then wakes up Apocalypse himself by accident. Good job.)
Film
- In Galaxy Quest, the "Omega 13" device is used to go back 13 seconds in time, "enough to change a single mistake".
- In the conclusion and epilogue of Jumanji, Alan prevents Carl Bentley from getting fired (or gets him re-hired), and the kids' parents are stopped from going on their fatal ski trip.
- 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.
- Primer. The plot involves Aaron going back in time twice to save Abe's girlfriend, Rachel, from her psychotic ex-boyfriend. Thomas Granger, Rachel's father, is believed to have come back for similar reasons, but we never find out exactly what his motives were.
Literature
- Animorphs: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.
- 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).
- Subverted in Farscape episode "Different Destinations," 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.
- Possibly subverted in "Resurrection of the Daleks", where the Dalek's used the Doctor's interference in their creation to justify starting the Time War. Alternatively, this could be playing the trope strait, as the Time War may actually be a better outcome than what the Time Lords originally predicted.
- Guinan of Star Trek The Next Generation is practically this trope walking personified, especially in "Yesterday's Enterprise".
- This is the main plot of Star Trek First Contact. The past is going perfectly fine until the Borg try and set wrong what once was right.
- 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.
- Subverted similarly (say that ten times fast) in Stargate SG-1. Jack and Daniel think that they're being sent to the past to fix mistakes in their lives, but it turns out that they're just mentally reliving them, not really time travelling, and there's no way for them to fix it anyways.
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.
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.
- Also a rare example where the Temporal Paradox part of succeeding is actually acknowledged; a paradox is caused because the heroes learn of the end from records after it happens, and then alter the future so the end which produced those records never comes into being. Chrono Cross is essentially an entire game about a whole cornucopia of consequences resulting from this, none of which are pretty.
- 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.
- In Dark Cloud 2 you had to restore various points in the future that were destroyed in the past by the Big Bad.
- Kain's motivation during the later Legacy Of Kain games is to fix the ruined world he himself created by traveling through time, although the plot is so complex and nearly every member of the cast is such a conniving manipulator that the importance of this, while not lessened, is somewhat drowned out. The rules of time travel in this setting make this goal even harder than it usually is; normally, You Cant Fight Fate and going back in time will merely cause a Stable Time Loop, but real alterations can be made by deliberately causing a Temporal Paradox and then acting inside of its effect.
- Used in Sonic The Hedgehog 2006:
- In Sonic's story, he eventually ends up time-traveling to a Bad Future, and discovering that it was caused by the death of Princess Elise, very shortly after the date that Sonic had just left. Sonic travels back to rescue her.
- In Silver's story, Silver is a native of the aforementioned bad future; he travels to the past (i.e. Sonic's time) intending to kill the "Iblis trigger" and prevent Armageddon. However, he thought that Sonic was the Iblis trigger—because Silver's source of information about the past was manipulating him into Making Wrong What Once Went Right.
- And, for those viewers who felt that What Went Wrong includes the entire plot of the game, that gets Set Right too by the Reset Button Ending.
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!"
- The first Futurama movie "Bender's Big Score" deals extensively with time travel, ending with Bender going back to the year 2000 with the tattoo on the time duplicate Fry's ass to put the tattoo back onto past-frozen Fry's ass in the first place, for any of the plot to make sense.
- 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.
- Bishop is terrible at this though, mostly due to his trigger happy nature. His plans to just kill/destroy the source of the problem and then head back to the future, never work because he doesn't unravel the conspiracies involved. Fortunately his actions let the X-men know who do manage to fix things.
- 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.
- Future Candace travels back in time after she discovers that her meddling with the timeline has turned the tri-state area into a dystopia ruled by Doofenshmirtz in the Phineas And Ferb episode "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo".
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