You Cant Fight Fate / Live-Action TV

Times where the idea that You Can't Fight Fate comes up in Live-Action TV Series.

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• Despite the main premise of 12 Monkeys being using time travel to change history and prevent a global pandemic, it becomes increasingly clear over the course of the series that the protagonists are stuck in a massive Stable Time Loop, with all their attempts to change history only enabling the timeline they're trying to avert. In this, they're no different from their enemies, the Army of the 12 Monkeys, who are also aware of the time loop they're all trapped in and are trying to break it as well (though it their case, they want to destroy time itself to do so). In the end, the heroes do succeed in their goal, breaking the loop and creating a new timeline where the plague, the 12 Monkeys, and the Witness never existed.
• In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., everything a future-foretelling Inhuman sees comes true, no matter what. He'd gone nearly mad trying to stop disasters and fail every time. Fitz explains it as the meaning of time being the fourth dimension, one just like the usual three (height, width, depth.) As a two-dimensional creature traveling along a line on a page wouldn't know what's on the other side until it got there, every moment in time already exists, complete and fixed, and just isn't seen by us until we get there. In the end, the Tonight, Someone Dies situation the man foresaw goes exactly as he saw despite everything.
  • This is the major source of conflict in season 5, in which the team travels to a Bad Future after Earth has been destroyed. If Fitz is right, that means there's no changing it. But in the end, this example manages to be subverted, as the team manages to avert the events leading to that future.
• Angel is Playing with a Trope here. A dark and seemingly inevitable prophecy forming one of the major plots of Season Three was ultimately revealed to be an elaborate Gambit Roulette on the part of time-traveling Big Bad Sajjhan, who wanted Connor killed off before he could fulfill the true prophecy: causing the death of Sajjhan. Ultimately, however, the true prophecy comes to pass...as does the fake one.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Help": A teenager has had premonitions about her own untimely death. Buffy saves her from homicidal maniacs, a demon, and a Death Trap, but she has a heart condition and dies anyway.
• For the most part, Charmed (1998) focuses on the characters acting to avert the future based on the premonitions of Phoebe Halliwell, a witch with the power of premonition. However, in the episode "A Witch in Time", Phoebe has a vision of her current love interest, Miles, dying in a shooting, and when she saves Miles’s life it creates a wound in time that allows a figure from a dark future to come back and join forces with his past self. The Charmed Ones eventually learn that Phoebe only had a premonition of Miles’s death because of her personal emotional connection to him, and as a result foresaw a natural death that was part of the Grand Design where her premonitions normally focus on demonic attacks that she and her sisters must avert. In the end, Piper is the last survivor after the time-displaced warlock kills Phoebe and Paige, and must use the same temporal rift used by the future warlock to go back in time by a day and tell her past self not to save Miles.
• Dark Oracle: Attempts at preventing the comic's predictions from coming true inevitably result in a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
• Dead Like Me: After the Reapers get notice of a given human's death, they ''will' die at the listed time on the following day, whether by heart attack or Disaster Dominoes. Subverted when a Reaper uses their foreknowledge to save a doomed human. Double Subverted when it's revealed that a human who misses their scheduled death has their soul "wither and rot and die inside [them]", so death is by far the better option.
• Devs: Determinism is the central theme of the series, and it lies at the heart of the Devs project, which uses quantum computing to see everything that ever has or will happen. But does knowing exactly what you will do mean you have no free will?
  • In episode 6, Lily is told by Katie that she will visit Amaya within 48 hours. While Lily initially resolves to disprove the prediction of the Devs machine, she ultimately decides to visit Amaya after Jamie is killed by Kenton.
  • Lyndon is easily convinced by Katie to climb over the railing of a dam to prove his belief in the Everett interpretation/many worlds theory that in some universes he lives and goes back to work in Amaya, and in others he dies, because Katie told him that he was going to do exactly that.
  • Zigzagged in the finale. Lily is shown the simulation of her final moments: she shoots Forest in the head, but this causes the electromagnetic lift to fail, killing her as well. In the real world, she tosses the gun as the lift's door closes, ensuring that she can't shoot Forest. However, Stewart disables the electromagnetic field, killing both Lily and Forest.
• Doctor Who:
  • First discussed in the First Doctor story "The Aztecs". Barbara is mistaken for a high priestess, yet refuses to sacrifice a man in the hope it will reform the Aztecs and the Conquistadores won't feel justified in destroying them. However, the man believes it's the will of the gods and commits suicide instead.
  • In "Frontios", Turlough has Norna pick a hand and when that chosen hand has a good luck piece in, claims that it clearly shows that he can't fight destiny. In fact, he had one in both hands, because he knew what he ought to do.
  • "Father's Day" and "The Angels Take Manhattan" further clarify this: you can change the future all you want... unless you know it. Once you know something is going to happen, you can't change it, even if somebody who doesn't know still can.
  • The Time Lords of Gallifrey (currently personified in one remaining member) are able to see the bend and flow of space-time to the point that they know when an event inevitably MUST happen in the grand cosmic scheme, and when certain things are permissibly malleable. The latter fact results in Donna convincing the Doctor to save a Roman family that they've befriended in Pompeii in 79 CE, even while he will not stop the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, no matter how many may be perishing. ^note  Incidentally, the Doctor caused the eruption as a lesser of two evils.
  • In "The Waters of Mars", the Doctor handles a fixed point differently, instead breaking his own rules and challenging time. Everything then goes wrong and the woman he saved kills herself to stop him.
  • "The End of Time": "He will knock four times and then you will die." There were an awful lot of dangerous but non-deadly four-beat noises before the end came.
  • "The Wedding of River Song": River's attempt to stop the Doctor's death. It was a fixed point in time and, when it failed to happen, time literally began to disintegrate. Incidentally the Doctor had already worked out a way to survive this through Tricked Out Time, using a shapeshifting robot which was shot in his place while the minutarised Doctor hid inside it.
  • In "The Time of the Doctor", this is invoked as part of the Stable Time Loop that explains why the Kovarian sect of the Silence couldn't stop the Doctor. In particular, they mention the attempt to steal the TARDIS and blow it up, which actually opened the very crack in the universe that the Time Lords are using to relay their distress call, leading the Doctor to Trenzalore and causing the war to occur in the first place.
    The Doctor: The Destiny Trap. You can't change history if you're a part of it.
  • The Past Doctor Adventures novel Imperial Moon features a minor positive example of this; when the Doctor learns that he and Turlough are destined to join the British Imperial Spacefleet’s expedition to the Moon in 1878, he notes that since the meeting is predestined, all he and Turlough have to do is materialise in the lunar park the expedition discovered and walk towards the British ships, as they already know they’ll survive to make contact and can basically leave the fine details to chance.
• The Flash (2014):
  • Played with. Towards the end of Season One, Eddie Thawne breaks up with Iris West after learning that Iris will marry her best friend Barry Allen in the future, and not him. However, the revelation itself was not the exact reason why he broke up with Iris, so much as the fact that it forced him to confront what he knew all along, but didn't want to admit — that Barry's feelings for Iris were not unrequited, and that ultimately, she loved Barry more than she did him. Iris did not react well to this at all, and her immediate reaction was Screw Destiny. Eddie did come around to her way of thinking eventually, and they got engaged as a result. Unfortunately, it was played depressingly straight in the Season One finale after Eddie commits Heroic Suicide to stop Eobard Thawne. Ultimately, Eddie and Iris weren't meant to be.
  • This trope is part of why fans thought Season 3 was too dark, arguably even darker than Season 2. In the mid-season finale, Barry accidentally travels to the future after making sure Savitar can't escape the Speed Force, and sees him kill Iris. Earlier in the season, Caitlin reveals she has the same powers as Killer Frost, and Cisco has a vision of the two of them fighting. Everyone spends the episodes after that trying to prevent those events from happening, but after Savitar is freed from the Speed Force and Caitlin becomes Killer Frost after almost dying, things start to look more bleak. Barry even travels several years into the future and sees how worse things are (Wally is physically and mentally damaged after trying to get revenge, Killer Frost caused Cisco to lose his hands and the use of his powers, and Joe and Barry are both past the Despair Event Horizon). In the end, Iris' death is only prevented by H.R using technology from Earth-19 to disguise himself as her and take her place, at the cost of his own life. However, this leads to Savitar interrupting Cisco and Killer Frost's fight, meaning Cisco doesn't lose his hands and Caitlin eventually gains control again.
• The entire point of FlashForward's plot, where everyone on earth blacks out and, if they survived, sees a Flash Forward of themselves six months into the future (except for Harold and Kumar). For instance, Joseph Fienne's character sees that he's on a taskforce to find the source of the blackouts, and when he wakes up his investigations land him on...a taskforce to discover the source of the blackouts.
  • Subverted when Harold's character, Demetri, survives March 15, the day that he was predicted to have been killed. The episode still plays it straight with villain Dyson Frost (who also predicted his own death on that date) dies.
  • Olivia highlights a major piece of Fridge Logic: since the flash forwards are everyone's precise vision of the same 2-minute period, you can avert your flash forward simply by ensuring that on April 29th you are as far away from where you saw yourself in your vision.
  • Quadruple-subverted with the Blue Hand Group: people who didn't have flash forwards since they'll be dead before April 29th and engage in risky behavior, as they think they have nothing to live for. When some of them live because others decided to Screw Destiny, their members start dying before April 29th anyway, in the same manner as they were predicted to. Lloyd thinks its fate trying to correct discrepancies but it turns out to be the Blue Hand's former leader doing what he thinks is fate's work. Double-subverted again when the FBI tries to stop him from running over his last victim, only for one agent to accidentally hit her with her car, proving Lloyd's theory that if you prevent your flash forward, someone else will just take your place in the sequence of events.
• Forever: Quoted almost word for word in the pilot.
  Henry: Abe is the only one who knows my secret. Fate brought us together years ago, and if I've learned nothing else from my time here, it's 'Don't mess with fate!'
• Game of Thrones: It's implied that the Three-Eyed Raven was aware that Hodor would be thrown in a mind-loop, though the event appears to have been accidental due to the chaos and urgency that the attack on the cave caused, and Bran's inexperience in controlling his warging powers. In context, Hodor's mind-loop had to happen just because Hodor exists, meaning that it already happened even decades before Bran was born. He also made Bran concentrate on Meera's instruction, prompting the boy to create the loop. Whether he intended for this to happen (making Bran create "Hodor" in a desperate attempt to save his life) is not clear.
• In the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys two part adventure "Armageddon Now", Callisto goes back in time to prevent who she thinks was Xena (because her army was in the village) from killing her parents. While trying to protect her family from Xena's army, the adult Callisto accidentally kills her own father & mother.
• Heroes:
  • The episode "Six Months Ago" has Hiro finding out that the waitress that he's been trying to save from Sylar is already dying from a blood clot on her brain.
  • In season two, Hiro's father Kaito is thrown to his death from a rooftop, and Hiro travels back in time to try to prevent it. However, Kaito is resigned to his death, telling Hiro that it's his fate and they can't use their powers to play God. Hiro eventually accepts that and lets the murder play out, but nonetheless uses the opportunity to discover that Adam Monroe was the killer.
• The grim and sad conclusion that Ted and Lily in How I Met Your Mother come to in "Band or DJ" when they admit to each other that there are times when Lily wished she wasn't a mother and Ted wished Robin was marrying him instead of Barney.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Miyuki Tezuka/Kamen Rider Raia from Kamen Rider Ryuki, a psychic who claims his visions are always accurate, believes this. When he foresees the death of his friend Shinji Kido/Ryuki, however, he lies and tells Shinji that he foresaw his own death. During a later battle, Miyuki takes the metaphorical bullet for Shinji, averting his own prediction but turning his lie into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O is a show entirely about the rest of the cast trying to prevent Zi-O from becoming Oma Zi-O, the godlike despot who rules over the Bad Future they come from. Despite all their efforts, eventually Sougo dons the mantle of Oma Zi-O anyway. Thankfully, it's only so that he can use Oma's omnipotence to turn the entire show into The Story That Never Was.
  • Kamen Rider Saber has the Sword of Darkness Kurayami, which grants its bearer the power to see the future and has a tendency to turn them into a Well-Intentioned Extremist as a result. The third wielder adopts this mindset after being shown not just one but every possible Bad Future by Kurayami, gaining a habit of speaking aloud what's going to happen shortly before it does and reacting with confusion whenever Saber manages to defy destiny.
• In Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, the Zyurangers learn of a life-granting elixir that could potentially grant Burai extra time, especially after Witch Bandora destroys the room he's been staying in to halt the remaining time he had. Goushi and Dan go after the water and go through various trials to find it. Ultimately, they're confronted by Clotho, who tells them that, even with the elixir, Burai can't be revived again. On the plus side, however, they do use it to save a kid that was gravely injured, allowing Burai to pass on guilt free.
• In Lexx, time is forever looping and repeating itself identically. The Time Prophet, whose predictions drive several plot points, cannot actually see the future; what she sees is actually the events of a previous loop. This does not stop some from trying to avert prophecy, particularly the first-season villain, His Divine Shadow. He fails.
• On seasons 3 & 4 of Lost many characters cannot be killed or die (Michael, Locke, Widmore, Ben, Tom, Jack) because "the island needs them". Similarly, many characters are fated to die and any attempts to save them only postpone the inevitable.
  • Also done with the main law of time travel, "Whatever happened, happened", meaning no matter what the characters do, the universe falls back into place.
  • Also done in season 3 with Desmond's mental time flashes. No matter how he tries to save Charlie's life, he still needs to die.
• Merlin:
  • In the pilot, Merlin is told that it is his fate to protect Arthur. Since he has a less than stellar opinion of him, he avoids him for the rest of the day. Then nighttime comes and an enchantress puts the court to sleep and throws a knife at Arthur. Merlin pulls him out of the way without thinking. By the time he's realized who he rescued, the king has made him the prince's new manservant as a "reward".
  • The entirety of the last season. In the first episode, Merlin is shown a vision of Arthur being fatally wounded by Mordred. Try as he might, he ultimately failed in preventing it and actually cemented its coming through his actions.
• The Monty Python's Flying Circus episode "The Cycling Tour" plays with this trope for comic effect. Mr. Pither accepts a lift from Mr. Gulliver, whose company has been developing food that can predict accidents and avoid them ("Even if it's in your stomach, and it senses an accident it will come up your throat and out of the window"). While Gulliver is explaining this one of his experimental tomatoes ejects itself from the car. Gulliver is so excited that it works that he loses control of the car, causing the very accident that the tomato had predicted.
• "A Determined Woman", an episode of the Dawn French comedy anthology series Murder Most Horrid, tells the tragicomic story of an inventor (French) working on a time machine, who gets so annoyed with her idiot husband disrupting her work that she hits him with a spanner, a little harder than she intended... some years later, after serving time for his manslaughter, she completes her time machine and goes back to try and save him, only to discover that her attempts to prevent his death were what caused it in the first place.
• Episode 6 of MythQuest sees Alex wanting to change the outcome of Lancelot and Guinevere's affair. When he asks Merlin about it, he says "Never had much luck changing fate. You throw a rock in the river, and the water just sort of... moves around it."
• The Outer Limits (1995):
  • The series had its own tendency to mess with this concept. "Gettysburg" is a great example. A mysterious time traveler, who had appeared in previous episodes, returns. However, this time, instead of attempting to arrange "justice" against villains from the past while remaining consistent with recorded history, he is attempting to directly change what happened. Specifically, he hopes to avoid the assassination of the first black president in 2013, regarded as one of America's greatest leaders, by a Southern Sympathizer whose beliefs are all tied up in the Glory of the Confederacy. The time traveler sends the guy back from a Gettysburg re-enactment to the real battle where he serves under an insane commander and faces the true harshness of the war and his supported side. He learns his lesson, and comes face-to-face with his ancestor, whose self-serving cowardice contradicts the impressive legend that he had idolized during his youth, and he rejects extremism and the no-longer noble rebellion against the government. However, the insane commander from Gettysburg is accidentally transported to the 2013 date and, while trying to kill "Lincoln" (in truth, an impersonator at the memorial event), manages to assassinate the president anyway.
  • Played with in "Breaking Point". Andrew McLaren travels forward in time two days and finds his wife Susan dead in their house, having been shot. It turns out that his attempts to prevent her death are what resulted in it happening in the first place. He then travels back in time to 1993 and kills his younger self just before he was about to meet Susan so that she will live. However, Susan was severely depressed at the time and Andrew was the one who helped her get her life back together. The episode ends with Susan taking an entire bottle of pills with alcohol. The clear implication is that she will not survive the night.
• Paper Girls: Adult Tiffany says the timeline can't ever really be changed, as they're caught in a predestination paradox where trying to is what caused this.
• Power Rangers features a variant across several series- you can change the future, but it makes things worse. Much worse. In Power Rangers Turbo, a robot goes back in time to prevent a war that was to happen two years later. It happened the next year instead. To say that the war ended well is lying.
  • For a Sentai example, the original Sixth Ranger Burai of Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger is told shortly after his introduction that he will die in 40 hours. This can be halted for awhile so long as he doesn't try to fight the bad guys but he needs to save the others often and whenever he does more of his remaining time ticks away. Every moment he appears in has somebody trying to find a way to prevent this, but they eventually find out that no, not even the gods can save him, his time has come. Sure enough he dies shortly before the finale, although he managed to make peace with himself and his impending death and dies with no regrets.
    • Another variant for another Sentai is another Sixth Ranger of Mirai Sentai Timeranger TimeFire who is also destined to die. Here it's not as specific. TimeFire will die, but as the ranger and not the person, meaning anybody could fulfill this destiny as TimeFire. The original TimeFire found this out and did his best to make sure somebody else took over for him ASAP. Sure enough the new TimeFire dies in the battle he was destined to die in, but the original's selfish scheme is discovered by the other Rangers, who promptly kill him anyway.
    • In Mahou Sentai Magiranger any time prophetic flashes, visions, or just straight up prophecies are brought up, they will come true. But once they have come true, there's nothing to stop anyone from undoing them.
• Quantum Leap played with this. In each episode, Sam's goal was to fight a particular piece of fate, and he invariably won. However, when he and Al occasionally tried to change other things in their own personal interest, they were unable to do so. For example, in "MIA", Al lied to Sam about what his goal was, and had him try to stop Al's own wife Beth from remarrying while he was a prisoner of war. Whatever Sam did to keep Beth away from her future second husband, they kept bumping into each other in unlikely places. Sam was actually there to stop a cop getting shot and Al just never ran alternative scenarios. In "The Leap Home, Part 1", Sam could not convince his father to take up a healthier lifestyle and live longer, or stop his brother from going to Vietnam and getting killed, because his only goal for the episode was to win a basketball game (albeit win a game where victory would allow two of his classmates to go to college on scholarships and his coach to move into the professional leagues). It seems the Unknown Force only unlocked little bits of fate at a time. Sam did save both his brother's life and Al's marriage in later episodes, though.
• On Reaper, one guy manages to weasel out of his Deal with the Devil. The Devil gets his soul anyway.
• Red Dwarf:
  • "Cassandra" provided a perfect example with a computer that could tell the future. After it had foretold that certain characters would be left alive, a gun was pointed in their face and the trigger pulled; naturally, it jammed. When pointed at another character who she foretold would die, it worked perfectly. This trope was then used almost word for word to seduce another character, since the computer had foretold he'd die while having sex with her (When her boyfriend caught them in the act). But in the end, it turned out that the computer was lying to cause jealousy. She foresaw that the boyfriend would kill her. He realized this and tried to avoid it, saying he wasn't going to kill her, but through a Rube Goldberg series of events ends up killing her anyway.
  • Lister, who was foretold would kill Cassandra, wasn't dating Kochanski but it was foretold that he would kill Arnold with a harpoon gun as 'Rimmer' died of a heart attack after being told he would, but it was actually the captain of the squad wearing Rimmer's jacket with Rimmer's name on it. This was Rimmer's attempt at screwing destiny. This was all part of Cassandra's scheme as she knew she would die and rather sees 'visions' of the future rather than actual predictions as some of her 'predictions' are unclear even to her and thus attempts to take down whoever she can before she dies.
  • "Future Echoes". Each character sees "future echoes" which are events happening in the future, which will happen to the characters at some point as the ship is going past light speed. As they go faster past it, the echoes are in the more distant future. At one point, Lister sees the Cat with a broken tooth. Lister runs off to find the Cat to prevent it, and just as the Cat is about to eat the robotic fish inside the tank (which would break his tooth), the two struggle, with Lister trying to stop the Cat eating the fish. In this struggle, the Cat knocks his tooth off a corner of the ledge where the tank is, thereby breaking his tooth anyway.
• Subverted in Smallville episode "Crisis": Clark receives a phone call from Lana in the future, in which she's being chased through the rain by a gunman, but is able to use the gunman's stolen phone to call Clark and tell him "it's happening!" before being shot dead in the back. Seeming to play the trope straight, despite the gang's best efforts they're unable to get to the phone's original owner before it's stolen, and the gunman manages to lure Lana out of hiding and kidnap her. During the final chase all the key audio cues play as they did during the original phone call, and some of the camera shots are repeated. Lana even falls over at the moment the gunshot is taken; however, this time Clark steps in front of the bullet at the last moment. (Tricked Out Time does not apply since the original sequence showed the bloodstain spreading on Lana's back.)
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever", Edith Keeler must die so that Germany doesn't win World War II and wipe the Federation from existence. (Had she lived, she would have founded a peace movement that would have delayed the United States' entry into the European front of WWII, allowing Nazi Germany sufficient time to develop the atomic bomb and thus win the war.)
• The classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect" makes a point of this trope when Dr Crusher very deliberately tries to avoid breaking her glass in the next loop but just ends up breaking it another way.
• In Star Trek, if you attempt the Kobayashi Maru scenario, it will result in failure, no matter what you do. Unless you hack the simulation program.
• Parodied in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations". After flirting with an attractive Lt who shares his ancestor's last name, Bashir wonders if he is supposed to sleep with her to make sure he is born. O'Brian immediately points out that he's being ridiculous.
• Supernatural:
  • Every Deal with the Devil ends with hell, no matter if you're a guest star or one of the leads. Well, they did save the one guy who only made the deal to save his wife...but no one since. As the season 4 opener reveals, you can still get out with a little help from above.
  • In a more typical example of the trope, the episode "The Monster at the End of This Book" reveals that there's a man with the gift of divine prophecy whose prophecies always come true, even when Sam and Dean try to avert them—which doesn't discount the possibility of a Prophecy Twist if the prophet doesn't see the whole scene.
  • Majorly subverted with the end of season 5. Sam and Dean are meant to be Lucifer and Michael's vessels and battle it out.... they refuse and form Team Free Will.
  • Discussed by Dean and Tessa in "Appointment in Samarra". Dean questions why some have to die and others don't, and Tessa replies that it's all part of a larger plan. Dean rejects this and goes on a tirade about destiny being nothing but a lie, but Tessa notes that he doesn't actually believe that.
  • Happens literally in "My Heart Will Go On" when the Monster of the Week turns out to be one of the Fates. An Alternate History has been created (the Titanic never sunk) without her approval, so Fate is killing (via freak accidents) anyone descended from the passengers and crew. Hilarity Ensues when the Winchester also get on her hit list.
• Tales from the Crypt: The main character of the episode "Showdown" witnesses a scene showing the town where the plot takes place has become a Ghost Town-turned tourist attraction in the future decades from the present, with a tour guide informing his group of tourists about the way said character's life ended. The episode concludes with his life ending the way the tour guide did/would claim to end.
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles twists the whole notion around at the end of the second season: John travels forward in time past Judgment Day, and discovers that he was superfluous; humanity is still around and kicking without him.
• In That's So Raven, Raven Baxter's visions of the future will never be prevented. Most of the time she's the one causing them to happen in the first place. This also occurs in the Sequel Series Raven's Home with her son Booker Baxter-Carter. He also cannot prevent future events from happening. Blessed with Suck rolled with It Runs in the Family.
• Played with in the 1989 TV movie Turn Back the Clock as Stephanie (Connie Sellecca) shoots her abusive, cheating husband in self-defense on New Year's Eve. About to be arrested, he remarks to friend William how "I wish I could just do this year over again." In a flash, she finds herself exactly one year in the past, hoping to prevent what happens. But no matter what she does, Stephanie is helpless to stop her husband's affair or circumstances that ruin William's own life. It builds to the same New Year's Eve with her husband about to kill her...only for William to show up and shoot him instead.
  William: You can't change destiny...but fate doesn't care about the details.
• The Twilight Zone:
  • The Twilight Zone (1959):
    • Two episodes use this in the form of time travel — the protagonist of "Back There" tries to prevent Lincoln's assassination, and that of "No Time Like the Past" tries to avert catastrophes (Hiroshima, killing Adolf Hitler, etc.). Neither of them can change anything, obviously.
    • In "What's in the Box", Joe Britt attempts to avert the future that he saw on television in which he killed his wife Phyllis but his efforts lead directly to the brutal physical attack on her that resulted in her death. It happens exactly as he had seen on TV.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): "Profile in Silver" plays with this trope. A historian from the future (who happened to be a direct descendant of John F. Kennedy) prevented Kennedy's assassination, only to set in motion events that would bring about a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia. He manages to set things right by taking JFK's place in the motorcade, and Kennedy himself becomes a history teacher in his descendant's future.
  • The Twilight Zone (2002): "Cradle of Darkness" has the "killing Hitler" kind of plot. Andrea Collins goes back in time to when Hitler was an infant and succeeds in killing him then, but then the baby's nanny finds another child and that's passed off as Hitler.
  • The Twilight Zone (2019) naturally also displays this trope. In "Nightmare At 30,000 Feet", no matter what Justin does, he can't stop the plane from going down exactly as the podcast said it would. "Replay" also has this implied by the Bolivian Army Ending.
• In The Umbrella Academy (2019), Number Five travels through time to 2019 in order to prevent the apocalypse he found when he time traveled as a child. Unfortunately, all his and his siblings' attempts to stop the apocalypse just lead to the apocalypse happening anyway. Then they cause a new one when they time travel to the 1960s. Oops.
• The Unusuals: In the episode "42", Detective Banks has to keep saving a woman who foresees several bus robberies and tries to die during one (and tries again, and again, because Banks keeps saving her) because she believes she's fated to do so. He finally convinces her that you make your own fate, only for her to die in a bus crash at like 11:50pm.
• Watchmen (2019): Due to being almost completely omniscient, Doctor Manhattan experiences past, present and future all at once. Therefore what will happen is going to for him, no matter what. Because of this, he never even tries to stop being teleported away by the Kavalry's tachyon cannon, even though it seems like he could.
• In Wizards of Waverly Place, Justin, Alex and Max will battle for the family's wizard power. The winner is the only one who gets to be a wizard, hence the whole serious Sibling Rivalry.
  • Also, there's the children growing up to be (almost) like Jerry, Megan, and Kelbo.
  • The finale of the series ended up averting this trope. Alex wins the final challenge and thus receives all of the Russo family's magical power. However, there's nothing that states that other forces can't grant people magic: Justin is appointed the future headmaster of Wiz Tech, and also becomes a full wizard. Max is the only one who doesn't receive any magical ability, but he's OK with it, and Jerry promises to give him the sandwich shop.
• In The Worst Year of My Life, Again, Alex finds himself reliving the previous year. Although he tries to change things to make it go better for him, either the same things happen in a different way or something even worse happens.
• In WWE, whoever competes against The Undertaker at WrestleMania is destined to lose. Long live the Streak. Averted when Brock Lesnar defeated him at Wrestlemania 30 thus ending the Streak at 21 victories. Undertaker would be defeated a second time by Roman Reigns at Wrestlemania 33, which put him into semi-retirement; even then, Taker would defeat John Cena at WrestleMania 34, and AJ Styles in a Boneyard Match in WrestleMania 36, before finally retiring at Survivor Series in November 2020, 30 years after his debut, ending his WrestleMania record at 25-2.
• The X-Files episode "Synchrony" presents the case of a strange old man warning an MIT student and professor that the student is going to die at a specific time - because of this warning the professor, attempting to save the student, ends up accidentally pushing him into the path of an oncoming bus and thus the warning is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. The old man is actually the professor from the future, who has traveled back in time attempting to set right what will go wrong and prevent an impending scientific breakthrough that would be made by the professor in collaboration with his girlfriend, also a scientist, and the student, and which would be a catalyst for a catastrophic technological development. Mulder cites an old theory of Scully's about how the future can't be altered, and so the old man's efforts are probably doomed. Although the professor manages to kill both his present and future selves and erase all of his files, as the episode ends, the girlfriend is continuing the research on her own with backups of the erased data. And said scientific breakthrough? Something enabling Time Travel itself. What goes wrong is that it generalized knowledge of the future and knowledge that it can't be changed.

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