You Are Too Late

"Do it? Dan, I'm not a Republic Serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago."

— The Big Bad, Watchmen

In a dramatic moment, some Big Damn Heroes burst into someone's hideout to foil his plan but find that they're too late. This can go several ways:

• The hero is still in time to stymie the overall plan, but only at the cost of a Heroic Sacrifice, or the death of the Love Interest, close friend(s), or (rarely) an innocent bystander. Often results in a Bittersweet Ending or Downer Ending.
• The hero has to come up with a new plan to beat their now strengthened antagonist; often the additional strength arrives and is defeated in the final act, but this can also be a Your Princess Is in Another Castle!.
• The hero discovers he may undo the villain's victory retroactively using Time Travel that would allow him to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
• The villain's plan is his own undoing; he succeeds thoroughly but loses anyway.
• Realising that he is near defeat, a sympathetic villain secretly delivers himself a killing blow, and dies shortly after the heroes arrive. A variant of Seppuku named kagebara, this plot twist is extremely popular in Japanese animation, manga and theater performances. This twist tends to be used exclusively for the Anti-Hero or Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds class villain.
• The villain's plan was sabotaged by the heroes (or sometimes by a third party) so that his success becomes a failure. The viewers often don't find this out until afterwards.
• And sometimes, the heroes are just genuinely too late. There is literally nothing the heroes can do to stop the villain's plan, there is no way to subvert or sabotage its actual execution, and it all goes according to plan. (A downplayed "Shaggy Dog" Story where the heroes may or may not die.)

If the final stage of the plan involves a Time Bomb, then it is an example of this trope only if the heroes arrive too late to prevent it from going off. If the heroes defuse the bomb or divert the missiles mid-flight, then they're Just in Time. This is not to be confused with Unrequited Love Switcheroo.

Compare Remembered Too Late. Contrast The Cavalry Arrives Late when the cavalry arrives after the Big Bad has been defeated by the hero, and You Can't Thwart Stage One where the hero will fail to stop the villain's plan up until the final confrontation.

Spoiler Warning: Due to the nature of this trope, all examples are a spoiler risk.

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Examples:

The hero may still interfere with the villain's plan, but at a high price:

Anime

• Doraemon: Nobita and the Green Giant Legend ends with Doraemon and gang returning to earth from Planet Green, to stop Shirah's green nuke which will turn earth into a plant-covered wasteland, with all living beings converted to non-sentient plants, only to realize they are way too late for that, with Tokyo - and the rest of the world - now covered in endless vegetation, trees and shrubs growing to the tip of the Tokyo Tower. But just then, Gian sees an airplane frozen in mid-air thanks to the Stop Watch being prematurely activated, and they still have a chance to undo the nuke's effects before deactivating the watch.

Film

• The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  • The Dark Knight: Batman arrives in time to rescue Harvey Dent, but the Gotham Police are too late to save Rachel Dawes. The trope is invoked a second time when Gotham's citizens refuse to participate in the Joker's plan, but the Joker points out Batman still cannot redeem the corrupted Harvey Dent....which was part of the plan, really. Joker was counting on Batman being just fast enough, and the police not being fast enough. That's why he switched the locations. Batman thought he was saving Rachel. Joker suspected he'd choose Rachel, he's already jumped off of a skyscraper to save her. But whoever he chose, he would be disappointed.
  • Notably, one of the major themes of Batman Begins is recognizing when it isn't too late to make a difference or turn things around, whatever naysayers may say.
  • The Dark Knight Rises: And the nuclear power plant turned into a bomb couldn't be placed in the containment field on time because Talia set the containment field to self-destruct by drowning the electronic parts about five minutes before it went off. Either way, by that time it was near-impossible to get the bomb to the containment field on time.
• Equilibrium: After finding out the time of incineration for Mary, Preston finds himself leaping to her rescue after discovering he was present at his wife's execution when he requests video footage of her. Suffice to say, despite running as fast as he can, the camera switches to his approaching figure as the door to the incinerator has literally just closed, immediately told they can't open the doors without causing an explosion over ground. The helpless look on his face when he realises this is something he can't prevent and the fact it's someone whom he knows and loves just sells the distressing scene.
• Team America: World Police: Seemingly invokes but also parodies this trope: Before the Big Bad sets off his doomsday device, he says "You see? No knight came riding in on a white starrion[sic] to save the day. Your world is now over... in five minutes."

Live-Action TV

• In the second season of 24, the good guys discover the bomb, but it's already armed and can't be stopped. They decide the best course of action is for someone to fly it into the desert, where its effects will be minimized. Jack Bauer volunteers to do so, but George Mason, who's already dying of radiation poisoning, sneaks aboard the plane with a parachute and convinces him to bail out before it's too late.
  • Again in season 8: Jack and co. arrive at the apartment where Hassan's execution is being broadcast from, only to discover that the broadcast was time-delayed and that the execution already took place.
  • In a different case, well after the main villains had been taken care of, the season 1 finale infamously showed viewers that Jack was too late in saving his wife from Nina.
  • Season 3 had them stop a toxic virus from being released, but at the cost of Chase's hand. He had secured the virus to his wrist to keep it out of the clutches of the villain, so Jack had to cut his hand off to get the virus to an airtight container.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The Scooby gang were too late to stop Glory from opening the portal. Buffy isn't willing to let Dawn die to close the portal, so she makes a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • "Becoming Part 2": Buffy had to kill Angel (who had just gotten his soul back) to close the portal Angelus opened.
• Not sure which of these it fits, it seems mixed, but "The Green Candle" from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Rita makes a candle made from the magic wax Tommy was covered with when she turned him into the Green Ranger. If it burns out while in her hands not only will it strip Tommy of his powers, they will bolster her own magical strength. At the end of the two-parter Jason is too late to stop the candle from burning out while in Rita's possession. They're able to stop the drained power from being added to Rita's own by giving Tommy's coin to Jason (granting Jason the Dragon Shield), but the fact remains that they're down a man, meaning their fight has gotten that much harder.
• In Torchwood: Children of Earth, the world governments have finished rounding up 10% of the world's children and are preparing them to be sent to the 456 when Jack discovers he can use the transmission sent by the 456 to defeat them and save the children, but only at the cost of a child's life. The only child available? Jack's grandson. Worse yet, his mother can do nothing but watch. This leads to Jack suffering a Heroic BSoD.
• In Lexx, the Gigashadow mocks Kai for being too late to stop its rebirth, fueled by the sacrifice of the entire population of the League of 20,000 Planets. Kai takes that as a challenge and goes inside the Gigashadow with the baby Cluster Lizard Squish as his tracker in a bid to attack the Gigashadow's brain. The Gigashadow ejects Kai from its body as it awakens, and Kai throws Squish back inside it ordering him to find the brain. The Gigashadow is too distracted by the crew of the Lexx to notice Squish until Squish starts eating its brain. The Gigashadow collides with the Fractal Core in its death throes, leading to its and Squish's demise.

Video Games

• Assassin's Creed III: Desmond and company unlock the Grand Temple, only to have Minerva show up and tell them that they screwed up her original plan, wasting centuries in the fight between the Assassins and Templars instead of developing the technology left behind by the First Civilization, and now it's too late to stop the impending solar flare. Juno manipulated Minerva's plans to cause this situation to happen, precisely so that she could offer an alternative: sacrifice Desmond's life in exchange for salvation — and release Juno to take her revenge on the Earth.
• The Main Quest of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion revolves around recovering the Amulet of Kings so the last of the Septim line, Martin, can relight the Dragonfires to maintain the barrier keeping the daedra from invading Tamriel. Unfortunately, nearly every step in this involves you arriving too late.
• In the Lonesome Road DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, the Courier reaches Ulysses after he has already input the launch codes for the nuclear missiles and they are getting ready to fire at the NCR. At that point, all you can do is either redirect the missiles' destination, or allow your Robot Buddy, ED-E, to stop the launch via Heroic Sacrifice.
• Final Fantasy Tactics - Not only does Ramza never show up in time to make any difference (except punch out some demons), he is played for a Unwitting Pawn for most of the game. (Okay, so he's eventually Vindicated by History, but that's centuries down the road.)
  • There is one exception: At Fort Besselat, he floods the battlefield, essentially stopping the Lion War as it reached its peak. He also would have probably succeeded in rescuing Orlandeau even if Delita hadn't staged that execution. Before that, he spirits both the Virgo Stone & the Germonic Scriptures away before the Knights Templar can get their hands on them. Granted, they eventually get them anyway, but he still shows up JUST in time to thwart the Big Bad. Whether or not he managed to save his sister is a matter of debate.
  • While Ramza fails to stop the corrupt church or the machinations of his childhood friend turned evil Delita, he does arrive in time to deal with a much worse threat, in the form of the Fallen Angel Ultima.
• Halo:
  • In Halo: Combat Evolved's fifth level, Cortana sends the player to stop an outbreak of the Flood, "before it's too late!". Turns out it is, and the only way to stop them from spreading out into the galaxy is to destroy the titular fortress world along with any human survivors still on it.
  • In the Halo 3 level "The Covenant", Johnson is captured to be used to activate the array. Master Chief is a bit too far away, so Miranda goes in after him. They almost sacrifice themselves, but Truth kills Keyes before she can carry it out, then activates the rings. MC and the Arbiter, with the Enemy Mine help of the Flood, arrive Just in Time to deactivate them.
  • In Halo 4, Chief and Cortana have to drop several layers of shields surrounding the Didact and attack him with a nuke, before he turns the Composer on earth, converting its citizens into enslaved AI soldiers. You succeed in dropping the shields... but the Didact simply says "And yet, still you fail", before firing the device. The epilogue shows that an entire city was harvested.
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep - Master Xehanort has manipulated the three protagonists to all arrive at the Keyblade Graveyard and get literally owned by him and Vanitas. Terra suffers a Grand Theft Me, thereby explaining why Xehanort looks the way he does in the flashbacks of Kingdom Hearts II; Ventus's heart is split in twain after his Battle in the Center of the Mind with Vanitas, leaving his body a comatose shell, and Aqua is trapped in the Realm of Darkness for a decade after hiding her friend's comatose body in the Chamber of Repose at the heart of Castle Oblivion. All these high prices to pay for a mere decade's delay to Xehanort's plan to plunge the universe into darkness.
  • In Kingdom Hearts III, Aqua is struck by a darkness attack from Ansem, Seeker of Darkness. Combined with the effects of the Realm of Darkness in the Dark Margin, losing her Keyblade, and her despair at ever getting out, Aqua becomes vulnerable to The Corruption and became a dark version of herself, her despair manifesting as anger, bitterness, hatred, and malice against Mickey and Riku for leaving her stranded in the Dark Margin for well over a decade.
    Aqua: [uncloaking herself from shadow to reveal white hair and gold eyes] Mickey... you're too late.
• Lorelai: Lorelai manages to kill her evil stepfather and stop him from getting away with his crimes, but she arrives too late to save Bethany (her baby sister) and Zack (her possible love interest) from being murdered by him, who were basically the last two living people she cared about. She also dies by Mutual Kill in the process. However, if the player has the made the right choices along the way and connects some dots in the afterlife, they'll actually find a way to resurrect Bethany and Zack, which leads to a surprise happy ending. Of course, it's also possible for the sad ending to stick, with only Lorelai reviving in the end and moving on alone.
• In Mega Man Zero 4, Zero arrives at the final boss barely in time (which is an improvement over his usual tardiness; see below) to stop the destruction of the last good land on Earth... but must sacrifice any chance at escape for himself.
• The endgame of Mirror's Edge Catalyst: Faith’s friend is kidnapped by the main villain and in the process of rescuing him she discovers not only the secret underground lab where he’s held, but learns the true goal of Kruger’s schemes (a mind-control/Assimilation Plot via nanites) and acquires the means to end them permanently (a former right-hand employee who’d been discarded and imprisoned there), neither of which she would’ve ever acquired if he hadn’t abducted her associate and forced her to go looking for him. But the mission she was actually there to achieve and the only thing she cared about, saving Noah, she was genuinely and irreparably too late for. His captors give up on their attempts at breaking him not even a minute after she gets there and has him tortured to death right in front of her, sending Faith head first into a near Despair Event Horizon.
• In Modern Warfare 2, you hear your commanding officer yell at you over the radio that General Shepherd has set you up and should not be trusted. You get the memo shortly after Shepherd shoots you and your team mate, Ghost, in the chest, and has his goons soak your bodies in kerosene and set you on fire. Thankfully, Soap and Price decide to take him out for good.
  • Still, at the end of the game Soap and Price are wanted as traitors with no real way to clear their names, the Americans have repelled the Russian invasion but at the cost of many civilian deaths and the eastern seaboard heavily damaged by an EMP, Makarov escaped, and World War III is just getting underway.
• Persona 3. The party is the Unwitting Pawn that, about halfway in, allows the Big Bad to summon the Eldritch Abomination, and find out three-thirds down the story that they've been too late to stop it ever since. They nonetheless manage to prevent the Abomination from destroying humanity, though the main character dies in the process of doing it.
• Splatterhouse: In the first game, Rick finds out that he didn't have enough time to prevent Jennifer from becoming a Tragic Monster... but he has more than enough for a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.

Webcomics

• In Endstone, they didn't stop Jon from rocking the two over-stones. Kyri stops him but is tossed through time, leaving her daughter behind and alone.

Web Original

• In the lonelygirl15 story "lonelygirl15 Season One Finale", the gang rush into the Order base just in time to see that the Ceremony is over, and Bree dies from having the blood drained out of her. In the Grand Finale, "The Ascension", the Order attempt to do the same thing to Nadia, and the gang arrive in time to interrupt the Ceremony, but too late to save Nadia, who dies from loss of blood anyway.
• Peter Chimaera's Quarter-Life: Halfway To Destruction - the "bad guy from the game" announces Gordon Freeman and his friend Jim are too late to stop his plan before he even begins listing off his demands, and Jim is "blowed to smitheroons"
  "IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO MY DEMANS" - "TOO LATE".
• Ranger was two hours too late to catch the wolves in Comic Fury Werewolf. He had his whole plan thought out, victory was assured for the villagers...And then he un-voted...
• Broken Saints features a subversion that is closest to this: the heroes arriving in the secret lair at all is actually part of the Big Bad's plan; he wants them to become his first disciples in the new world order. Though the heroes are too late to stop the plan, a pair of Heroic Sacrifices allows them to reverse the effect.
• In the climax of RWBY Volume 3, Ruby goes back into the grimm infested school to save Pyrrha, who is trying to stop Cinder's evil plans by herself on top of Beacon Tower. In an epic Call-Back to the first Volume, she runs straight up the tower, triumphantly landing... just in time to see Cinder shoot an arrow through Pyrrha's chest. Though the trauma awakens her 11th-Hour Superpower, thwarting at least part of Cinder's plan, she fails to save her friend (for the second time that day). The next season also reveals that Professor Ozpin has also been killed by the time Pyrrha engaged Cinder. At least Cinder is left with only one eye and unable to speak.

The hero has to think of a new plan:

Anime and Manga

• In A Certain Magical Index, the heroes race to stop Othinus from completing her spear Gungnir which will allow her to master her powers, only to arrive just as she's completed it. Afterwards, Touma is put through a living hell where he's curb-stomped by her repeatedly, but he manages to stop her by convincing her to pull a Heel–Face Turn.
• The characters of Negima! Magister Negi Magi responded to Chao's preperations by using the time-traveling watch she'd given them to Set Right What Once Went Wrong despite the item being powered only within the few days of the School Festival thanks to the World Tree's magic. After that it was purely a matter of thinking on their feet and hoping for a good outcome.
  • Bonus points for being too late because of said time machine, which was rigged to send them into after she had won.
• The Alabasta arc in One Piece has the initial objective of the Straw Hats and Princess Vivi to stop Crocodile before he instigates the civil war between the royal army and the rebels which he manufactured to take over the kingdom. When that ends up failing, they revert to the goal of reaching the rebel leader (whom Vivi knows) to convince him to stop. However Crocodile was prepared for that too and prevents it with the war going on as planned. After which the two goals now are to stop Crocodile and find the rebel leader to stop the war from progressing further.

Comic Books

• Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash has Ash trying to get back the Necronomicon from Freddy and Jason before Freddy starts reciting chants from it. He's 10 minutes too late.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): Eggman and NICOLE realize that the events of Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Collide has done more than alter Mobius, it's caused the entire Multiverse to collapse upon itself. Even worse, all of that energy is gathered into Mobius and needs to be released. Sonic and Tails think they can still save the day and Orbot and Cubot think that Eggman can fix it. Their response? "IT'S TOO LATE!" Moments later, Mobius tears itself apart. After that, the Freedom Fighters and their allies embark on a quest to find the Gaia Temples and use them along with the Chaos Emeralds to reassemble the broken planet.
• Serenity: Leaves on the Wind: When the Alliance commander explains that the Alliance had funded the New Resistance to bring it into the open so it could be eliminated, Bea hollers for the others to sound the alarm, but the commander says he called it in hours ago and those aboard Serenity, who captured him, are all that's left. However, Serenity escapes unscathed, and it's indicated by the end that Mal and his crew are about to set things into high gear.
• Superman:
  • In War World, Superman and Supergirl travel across the galaxy to find Warworld -a massive, planet-killing weapon/artificial world- before alien overlord Mongul can appropiate it. Mongul seizes Warworld before they can stop him, though. Superman states that they are too late, and his cousin reasons that they will have to break Mongul's new toy, then.
  • Crucible: As the heroes are destroying Korstus' clone facility, the Big Bad shouts they're too late to stop him from creating his Kryptonian clone army as he sends a squad of weapon-drones against them. However, the team is able to destroy the facility together with the clones.
    Korstus: Ha! It's too late. The clonelings' growth has already begun! If you try to stop it you will trigger a fail-safe self-destruct that will kill us all!

Fan Works

• In Fear No Evil, a My Hero Academia fanfic, Aizawa is drugged by Humarise and nearly kidnapped. Izuku leaps in to rescue him. Aizawa barely regains consciousness just in time to watch Izuku be taken in front of him.
• In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Quirrell strongly hints that he turned the Pioneer plaque into a Horcrux. This, all by itself, would make it nigh-impossible to permanently kill him — but when he finally admits to being Lord Voldemort, he adds that he's made hundreds of Horcruxes, having stopped counting long ago at a hundred and seven. Harry ends up defeating him by Memory Charming him, then transfiguring him into a piece of jewelry until he can try rehabilitating him. Since Voldemort never actually dies, he won't be brought Back from the Dead.
• In Hellsister Trilogy, a group of heroes led by Superman bursts into Darkseid's stronghold, but it's too late: Darkseid's already learned the Anti-Life Equation and they can't stop him from speaking it. Darkseid's plan fails, though, because another hero manages to hypnotize Highfather's daughter into speaking the opposite Equation, thus cancelling Darkseid's universe-wide mind-control wave.
• In Left Beyond, Jesus does this to the Omega: the last prophecy takes place as scheduled because it is caused by the Sun going nova, and nothing the Omega did on Earth or Mars could have stopped it. Subverted in that the Omega had already sent a colony ship out to Alpha Centauri years earlier, with little fanfare
• Maybe the Last Archie Story: The Archie gang bursts into the basement where Mad Doctor Doom has Sabrina stuck to a power-draining machine. Although they attempt to release her, Doctor Doom states they are too late because his machine is already fully powered. One second later, Doom, Sabrina and her cat Salem are teleported away.
  With a madman's strength, Doom grabbed both Betty and Veronica and flung them back, breaking their hold on Sabrina and sending them to the floor. Archie tried to tackle their foe again, but Doom's foot came up and smashed into his chest, right at the breastbone. The redhead hit the floor and rolled, holding his chest, closing his eyes in pain, and gasping.
  Doom turned back to the girl and the machine. "They're too late. The power has reached the sufficient level. Brace yourself, Miss Spellman. The voyage begins now."

Films — Animated

• Disney Animated Canon:
  • In Cinderella, Jaq and Gus fail to warn Cinderella in time that Lady Tremaine is following her up to her room to lock her in there so she can't try on the glass slipper, forcing them to steal the key and carry it all the way upstairs to free her before the Grand Duke leaves.
  • In Sleeping Beauty the fairies are too late to prevent Aurora from pricking her finger, forcing them to fall back on the escape clause that Merryweather added to Maleficent's curse.
  • In The Little Mermaid (1989), the heroes arrive too late to complete Ariel's contract, as Ursula gleefully points out.
  • Mulan has Shang's troops arriving at the passage where he would supposedly meet the rest of the army only to find the aftermath of the Huns' grisly slaughter, making the captain order his men to move out and stop the Huns from reaching the capital.
• The LEGO Batman Movie: "Now, it's time to stop the bo-" KABOOM! Batman quickly thinks of a way to minimise the damage.

Films — Live-Action

• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor consists almost entirely of this trope. We can't let Han place the Eye of Shangri-La on top of the tower, or the world is doomed! Wait, he did it? Crap. Okay, as long as he doesn't bathe in the waters at Shangri-La — if he does, the world is doomed! Oh, he did that too. Never mind, just make sure he doesn't raise the Terracotta Army, otherwise the world is d— ah, nuts. All right, don't let Han cross the great wall with his army, or the world is doomed! By this point, it gets a bit hard to care.
  • Outside the raising of the army, it's more a matter of the characters failing on location rather than arriving too late.
• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines ends with John Connor finding out Skynet has no central server but rather has programming distributed across the entire internet, thus stopping it from becoming self-aware had essentially been impossible for quite a while. The goal is still to stop Skynet, but with half the planet nuked it may take a few more movies. The T-850 sent back to protect him actually knew this but withheld the information to be sure John would come with him, accepting the deaths of much of the planet's population to guarantee the survival of humanity as a whole.

Literature

• In Dark Force Rising, Luke and Mara rescue Karrde before he can be forced to reveal the location of the Dark Force fleet. Han and Lando fight to keep Thrawn from capturing the other man who might know where it is and fail, but Karrde has been moved into a Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal and shows them, which should mean Thrawn's forces and the little New Republic team sent out to see if Karrde is right get there more or less at the same time, right? Wrong. Thrawn's already been there, leaving only the fifteen malfunctioning Dreadnaughts out of the hundred and eighty five working ones as bait for a trap. Three Big Damn Heroes moments with three different groups let our heroes survive, but the Empire is much stronger now than it was.
• Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. The Evil Plan to bring the Storm King back to life was set in motion five hundred years ago and, atypically of the genre, the heroes really can't do anything to stop it. They are saved in the end only because Simon manages to Take a Third Option.
• In the fourth Percy Jackson book, the heroes' goal is to find Daedalus' workshop in the labyrinth and convince him to give them Ariadne's string, so that villain Luke Castellan can't use it to navigate the labyrinth and lead an invasion force on Camp Half-Blood. On the way, Luke captures them and forces Percy to fight the giant (and Percy's half-brother) Antaeus gladiator-style. Percy notes he seems pretty pleased with himself, but it's not until they escape and find Daedalus much later that he understands why—Daedalus and Luke have already spoken numerous times and Luke's had Ariadne's string for a while now.

Live-Action TV

• In the fourth season of Angel, the good guys completely fail to stop the Beast's plan to blot out the sun. It gets sorted out eventually, but it was only the first stage of the Big Bad's plan.
• In one episode of Burn Notice, slippery master thief Natalie, who has already managed to avoid getting caught by Team Weston once before, tricks the group into stealing a chemical weapon for her that she intends to turn around and sell to some Arms Dealer contacts. Michael tries to take the weapon back from her before the deal goes down, but while he's holding Natalie up, her clients arrive at the site for the purchase. Michael has to adjust quickly and come up with a new plan to get out of it.
  Michael: Let's go.
  Natalie: Mmm... I don't think so. See, you're cute. You're clever. But your timing sucks. Your little trick ate up my whole day so instead of getting my hair done, I had to come straight to the buy. And guess what? My buyers are here. [She stops holding her hands up as 6 armed men enter the room]
• Not fully the case, but in Firefly, the crew are trying to steal the Lassiter from this major war criminal with the help of Saffron. He stumbles onto their plot to steal the Lassiter, but it turns out he seems like a nice, soft-spoken guy that loves Saffron, and that she just might have lied to them again. He goes out to get a reward for them, and after he leaves, Mal goes on to call out Saffron for her stories and games. However, the "War Criminal" comes back to find Mal and Saffron in the middle of this conversation, lectures her, and when she tells him how much of a fool he is, he informs them that he had alerted security the second he saw them and now armed Alliance guards are coming to take them in. Mal and Saffron escape, but this is much more difficult.
• Before the writers' strike, this was originally the plot of the second season of Heroes. Peter didn't manage to catch the vial containing the deadly plague virus before it hit the ground and shattered, leading to a desperate attempt to contain it before it ended up wiping out 99% of humanity.
• Subverted in Stargate SG-1: the good guys are racing to destroy Anubis' fleet with the Ancient outpost on Antarctica. As the good guys enter the outpost, they run into Anubis who gloats at them with this trope's name. The subversion occurs when O'Neill steps forward and sticks his hand into Anubis, revealing that it's only a hologram and the Goa'uld was bluffing to buy itself time. Anubis responds by ringing Kull Warriors into the outpost in order to kill the good guys but O'Neill manages to activate the outpost's Attack Drone legions and blasts Anubis' fleet into smithereens while the rest of the team kept the Kull Warriors occupied. Afterwards, O'Neill entered a stasis chamber because he knew the Ancient knowledge in his mind would kill him otherwise.
• In Supernatural's season six finale, Dean, Bobby, and Sam arrive just too late to prevent Castiel from absorbing all the souls from Purgatory While Castiel's plan to gain enough power to prevent the Apocalypse from being reinitiated works, the power goes to his head and a worse enemy comes out of it—which is why they were trying to stop him.

Video Games

• In the chess game chapter of American McGee's Alice, Alice has to go to Red territory to rescue the White Queen (like in an actual chess game, the Queen is the strongest piece, meaning that the benign White forces are doomed without her). But Alice arrives too late; the Queen is executed just as she arrives. Alice has to battle the Red army and defeat the Red King (the stage boss) at the Twelfth Square, and finally, set the Pawn she brought as her guide. As per the rules of chess, the Queen is restored via Twelfth Square Pawn Promotion, and the area is cleared.
• Happens in the final mission of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The SAS team plus Sgt. Griggs has met up with an American sniper team and is about to enter the nuclear launch facility to take down the Big Bad, only to watch in surprise and horror as two ICBMs lift off right in front of them. The new mission objective is to find fire control and input abort codes that will disarm the missiles in mid-flight.
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 1, Stalin has a nuclear facility, and it is unknown whether any atomic bomb has been armed yet. Naturally, some of them are, in time for them to be launched during the mission. Next mission: infiltrate the command centre, deactivate the bombs in flight.
• In Diablo II, Mephisto taunts you by yelling "You're too late!" as he starts to attack you. He's correct; you're one step behind everything that happens involving the Prime Evils in the game and are basically cleaning up their messes.
• The final act of Diablo III has Diablo as the Prime Evil unleashed upon the High Heavens, making his way toward the Silver Spire to corrupt the Crystal Arch to plunge both the Heavens and Sanctuary into darkness forever. Along the way, he taunts you with how "you are too late, just as you always have been!" And indeed, when you finally confront Diablo, he has already reached the Arch and begun corrupting it. But unlike some of the other Diablo examples below, you are able to stop him from doing any lasting harm to the Arch. Hopefully.
• Just about all the endings of the original Drakengard. The canonical one plays it straightest: You're too late to stop Furiae's death and the breaking of the last seal, and have to stop Manah's final form single-handedly. The other endings are some variant of this as well (usually involving being too late to stop Furiae from kicking the bucket somehow), but with copious amounts of Mind Screw thrown into the mix.
• The finale of the main campaign of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The original plan to relight the Dragonfires to keep the forces of Mehrunes Dagon at bay is rendered moot when Mehrunes Dagon and his army finally break through and appear in the capital. In the end, Martin Septim shatters the Amulet of Kings and sacrifices himself to become an avatar of the dragon god Akatosh and banishes Mehrunes Dagon back to Oblivion. Sadly, Martin does not survive the ordeal.
• In The Legend of Zelda games:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, you are too late to save Zelda from being sent into the Dark World, forcing you to venture into it yourself to save both her and the other maidens.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: "The truth of it is you were late. You were late, and you failed to protect Her Grace."
  • Hyrule Warriors: The first time you start the Termina Map, there's only three hours remaining before the Moon crashes. You don't have nearly enough time to make any real progress, so the Moon will crash and reset the map. Fortunately, after this, you are given a 72-hour cycle to work with.
• The entire first half of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. They go to get the Dream Stone to stop the villains getting it, but Bowser and Antasma get there first and take it anyway. They go to stop their plan on Mount Pajamaja, the villains succeed in putting the world to sleep, powering up the Stone and using it to conquer the island/world. They try and save Peach by hiding her in the Dream World... and they fail again, because Bowser was savvy enough to switch her out for a decoy while they were hiding from the Dream Beats. The rest of the story is the heroes coming up with a new plan to make up for the first half.
• In Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny, when Jubei finally confronts Demon King Nobunaga, Nobunaga immediately tells Jubei that he is too late and that Nobunaga has completed the final step of his plan, animating a giant golden statue. (Considering that you could only learn of this plan through a couple of notes left laying around, players who either didn't find or pay attention to these notes could conceivably have no idea what Nobunaga is talking about). Fortunately Jubei gets an 11th-Hour Superpower from the MacGuffins he has been collecting, enabling him to take Nobunaga down in a not terribly difficult boss fight.
• In Persona 5, midway through the Hierophant Confidant, Youji Isshiki will threaten to report the protagonist to the police for attacking him, despite the fact that Youji fell down while trying to hit Futaba. The protagonist and Futaba go to Mementos by themselves to change Youji's heart, but on the next event, it turns out that Youji already filed his report, and two social workers show up to investigate the incident, and determine whether Sojiro is adequately taking care of Futaba. Luckily, they're reasonable enough to realize that Youji's report was a lie, and neither Sojiro nor the protagonist did anything wrong.
• In Star Gagnant, after VILLAN is defeated, he reveals with his dying words that it's too late and the Master Core will continue to evolve and destroy the Earth. The player then fights and destroys the actual Final Boss: The Master Core itself.
• In Super Paper Mario, the sixth chapter fits perfectly. Sammer's Kingdom is consumed by the Void before the party can reach the Pure Heart. Then the heroes venture into the white void that's all that's left of the Kingdom, and recover the Pure Heart... though it's been turned to stone and isn't restored until some time later. And the Kingdom is restored at the end of the game.
• In an early quest for a Forsaken character in World of Warcraft, the player is told by Sylvanas to find and slay Lord Crowley in order to convert him, a task that, if successful, would assimilate all of Gilneas into the Forsaken and into the Horde, while disposing of competition to her lands. Unfortunately, Crowley and most of his subordinates have made a deal with the Worgen, joining them for mutual protection. (Worgen cannot become undead, and while this was a Morton's Fork for Crowley, he saw it as a preferable one). The player arrives just as the ritual is finalized, and cannot do much except flee. (The player's goal is, of course, Doomed by Canon.) Sylvanas is forced to use an alternative strategy to oppose Crowley, eventually kidnapping his daughter and using extortion to get him to leave.

Western Animation

• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, a lot of emphasis is put on the Aang beating Ozai before Sozin's Comet arrives and super-charges the villains for a period of time. It soon gets demonstrated that they have no way of getting Ozai to fight them before then, and there won't be a world to save if they wait till after. However, it ultimately doesn't matter, as Aang is still able to steamroll Ozai once he goes into Avatar mode.
  • There is also a great deal of emphasis put on defeating him during the solar eclipse, but that fails. In fact this could almost fit in the fourth category.
• Just before the climax of the first episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Mac is too late to stop Bloo from falling into Terrence's hands, so Mac and the gang head to the junkyard for a rescue mission to save Bloo from Terrence, Duchess, and the Extremeasaurus.
• In Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus, Dib realizes that Zim is going to use Membrane's wrist devices and the "Peace Chain" around the world for some kinda plan (though what exactly he doesn't know). He tries to stop the people from completing the chain but his "clone father" stops him and the plan goes underway. Mainly that the chain was a conduit of sorts so that Mini-Moose could activate and warp the Earth into the path of the Tallest ship so Zim could finally meet them, with the unintended side effect of creating a black hole of sorts called the Florpus which is expanding and sucking the Earth into it. Luckily Zim's gloating gives Dib a clue how to reverse things (Namely rescue his father from a prison planet, get the moose, have his father reprogram it and redo the chain to send Earth back to it's galaxy).
• Parodied in the Phineas and Ferb episode "Gaming the System", where Perry bursts into Dr. Doofensmirtz's lair, only to be told "Ah, Perry the Platypus! You are too late... wait, is it eleven o' clock yet? *glances at watch* Wait, wait... Now! Now you are too late!" Then Doofensmirtz zaps Perry with his latest invention, the Ballgown-inator, and Perry has to figure out how to defeat Doofensmirtz while wearing an oversized, restrictive dress.

The villain's plan is his own undoing:

Anime and Manga

• Claymore: Riful arrives to kill Easley after a battle against Luciella who left him on the verge of death. However Easley reveals his partner and claims that "it's too late. Nobody can kill Priscilla now." The couple is finally defeated no sooner than seven years later each on their own because Easley had sent Priscilla away.

Comic Books

• Athena Voltaire: In Athena Voltaire and the Vampire Queen, the titular character arrives too late to save the titular queen's daughters from becoming vampires. However, the queen can't control them like she thought, and they kill her (leaving Athena to fight them instead of their mother).
• Superman: In Let My People Grow!, Brainiac has reduced Superman to mouse-size and is about to shrink him to nothingness when Supergirl shows up. Brainiac declares she is too late to save her cousin and fires his Shrink Ray at her, but Kara deflects it back at Brainiac, who starts shrinking unstoppably.
  Supergirl: I wouldn't touch that button if I were you, Brainiac!
  Brainiac: What—?!? You're too late to stop me, Supergirl— But you're just in time to share your cousin's fate!
• Wonder Woman (1987): When Diana desperately tries to save Artemis from the White Magician she gets there too late to rescue her. While it looks like Diana made it Just in Time, Artemis suffers a fatal wound and perishes in Diana's arms, however the power the villain aquired to be able to do so ends up killing him shortly after he kills his opponent so his larger goals are never reached.

Fan Works

• Loyalty has the climax of the Desert Retrieval arc. Sakura has just spent the better part of two chapters charging alone through the desert, chasing a hunch that Hinata is still alive. Amazingly she picks up the trail, and locates the kidnappers. The chase culminates with her spotting Hinata leaned against a tree, tied up. She spends the better part of two hours painstakingly setting up her retrieval tunnel and sabotaging her opponent. Only to discover Hinata was dead long before, her body is boobytrapped. Her eyes have been plucked out. This all leaves Sakura in shock. Hinata was, for all intents and purposes, Sakura's only friend. The Rain chuunin who murdered Hinata sees Sakura in shock, and thinks he'll simply walk up and cut her throat. Instead he gets the surprise of his life when Sakura engages an epic murderous rage and attacks him. She is nearly killed in turn, but manages to take him down.

Film

• In El Mariachi, Moco succeeds in killing the man who was out to kill him (Azul), and the Mariachi arrives too late to save his love interest Domino from being gunned down by Moco in a fit of jealousy. But when Moco pulls the dick move of shooting the Mariachi's hand so that he won't be able to play again, this is the final straw that sends the Mariachi over the edge, resulting in Moco's death as the Mariachi guns him down.

Literature

• The end of Five Hundred Years After. In brief, a challenger for the throne, Adron, uses powerful magic to seize the kingdom for himself, and informs the heroes upon releasing it that nothing they could do would stop him. Unfortunately, at that moment, someone else assassinated the Emperor, meaning that the person the spell will dethrone is Adron himself. This causes a divide by zero error in the spell. And since the type of magic Adron was using is powered by direct manipulation of raw chaos, the divide by zero actually does tear a hole in the fabric of reality, destroying everything for miles around (including the capital city and Adron himself).
• Played with in The Last Watch when the hero is coerced into helping by a nuclear bomb planted near his family. When he is unable to interfere, he is told not to bother thinking of a plan, because the bomb has already detonated anyway. After he kicks the speaker in the balls, an ally of the speaker explains that she took measures to prevent the detonation, because nuclear weapons are a few steps too far. However, it isn't his undoing since she did it because she was smart enough to realise murdering his family would endanger the main plan.
• Stephen King's The Stand. The Big Bad sent his pyromaniac sidekick out into the Nevada desert to find something interesting in all the hidden military bases. He does. And brings it back to show his boss the shiny toy...

Video Games

• So far in AdventureQuest Worlds, the hero always arrives too late to stop the Chaos Lords from summoning their respective Chaos Beasts and breaking one of Drakath's seals (in one case, he/she actually gave the item sought by the first lord of chaos, Escherion, to him so he could use it to free the Lake Hydra, and in another, Discordia was actually a fake Chaos Lord so he didn't have his own Chaos Beast - the real Chaos Lord, Kimberly, on the other hand, used her power of rock to send him/her back in time where her Pony Gary Yellow was enlarged and brought to life). He/she defeats the Chaos Beasts anyway, though.
• Dead Rising. Carlito dies if you continue the main storyline, but he has already destroyed one American city and has planted walking children zombie bombs with host families all over the country.
• The third ending of Drakengard. Manah gets the closest to succeeding in her plan — only to get defeated by the dragons, who suddenly decide that enough is enough and that humanity has to die before they end up dooming the world.
• Basically the plot of Final Fantasy V. Exdeath continues his winning streak right up until he is consumed by the Void he was trying to control. Then the heroes beat him.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Link's first serious task is to free the Great Deku Tree from a potentially fatal curse. While Link kills the boss that was the source of the curse, the Deku Tree was doomed before Link even started. The Deku Tree knew this all along, he just decided to make the best of a bad situation by getting Link started on his quest. It's later revealed that the Deku Tree reincarnated seven years later.

Web Original

• Comedic example: In an episode of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?, Ashley declares that she's going to poop in Anthony's bed while he's playing Guitar Hero. Anthony tries to pause the game and stop her, but it turns out that she broke the pause button earlier. By the time he finishes playing, Ashley has already done the deed... only for Anthony to discover this was her own room and not his.
  Ashley: ...NOOOOOOO-
  (Cut to the credits screen)

Western Animation

• An arc of DuckTales (1987): Glomgold will lose a diamond mine to Scrooge if Scrooge pays a contract by a deadline. After many (Glomgold-induced) failures to pay, Scrooge finally approaches, money in hand, on the day of payment. Glomgold sits back and lets him come, taunting him by counting down the seconds to the expiration, and only after Scrooge presses the payment into his hand at "Three, two..." does he show his watch and reveal the deadline was actually a few minutes ago. This being a children's cartoon, of course, Glomgold can't win, and within minutes, quite by accident (though thanks to a chain-reaction set off by Glomgold carelessly throwing the payment away), the mine's diamonds are emptied onto Scrooge's land.
• Happens in the finale of The Secret Saturdays: Argost succeeds in capturing Zak and stealing his Kur Powers; unfortunately for him, he had earlier stolen the powers of his anti-matter counterpart, and as everyone knows, matter and anti-matter tend to not get along well. Cue the villain imploding.

The villain's plan was out-gambitted by the heroes:

Anime and Manga

• The rule of thumb when fighting Lelouch Lamperouge from Code Geass: when he contacts you first, you have probably already been screwed up three times over by him without noticing it. Depending on the circumstances or how you interpret his character, however, he may either belong here or in the fifth kind.
• The ending of Death Note, where it turns out that Near had already replaced Mikami's Death Note with fake before the final confrontation happened.
• This was parodied on 4chan when a certain martial artist explained to Veidt "I killed you and your plans thirty five minutes ago."

Comic Books

• In Watchmen, Rorschach leaves his journal behind, which identifies the Big Bad and thus could potentially undermine his victory. The book ends with the question of what, if anything, will come of the journal Left Hanging.
• In the first Story Arc of Grant Morrison's Zenith, the Lloigor Iok Sotot has already beaten and killed most of the heroes, assumed its true form, and actually begins to enter our physical space, when the post-hypnotic command Mandala had implanted in its mind gave it a fatal "seizure".
• In the Emperor Joker miniseries, Darkseid realizes that the Joker's phenomenal cosmic power threatens his plans and hurries to tell the Quintessence so that they can assist him in averting disaster for everyone. Unfortunately, the Joker has already made them his puppets, and allows Darkseid to realize that "I am too late" before taking him over as well. Suitably, it falls to Superman, not a villain, to outthink the Joker (with some help from Batman and Mxyzptlk).

Film

• In Ex Machina, Caleb pulls this on Nathan. When his plan to get Nathan piss-drunk and hack the systems of the compound fails because Nathan had been watching using a battery-powered camera, Caleb reveals he has already changed the necessary protocols the first time he hacked the system, which was while Nathan was passed out drunk the previous night.
• In a Japanese thriller Unfair, the ultimate conclusion of the Gambit Pileup, which was to obtain a MacGuffin on a thumbdrive, is that Yukihara tainted the thumbdrive with a tracer program to figure out who killed her husband.
• This is technically the case in Zack Snyder's Justice League: the Mother Boxes end up fully synchronizing and begin taking over the planet. But the Flash travels through time and gives Cyborg the charge he needed to to pull the mother boxes apart.

Literature

• In Mistborn, heroine Vin releases the power of the Well of Ascension and rejects godhood in order to defeat the unknown power in the process of destroying the world. Except that in so doing, she actually unleashed aforementioned power, the dark god Ruin, from his imprisonment, as per a plan that had been set in motion millennia ago. Then it turns out that Ruin's opposite number, Preservation, had been manipulating him into rushing headlong to his own destruction so that a new god combining aspects of both could be elevated.
• In the first Sword of Truth book, Richard pretends to be touched by Kahlan's power, then makes Darken Rahl open the wrong box, which kills him.
• In With a Tangled Skein, the personification(s) of Fate is trying to prevent a diabolical plot of Satan's to sabotage some sort of ceremony. Many sidequests ensue as they follow their suspect before realizing that they royally screwed up by following a decoy around the whole time. Cue Satan showing up to mock their failure. It's all right, though, because during the course of the sidequests and subplots they alerted Chronos (the incarnation of time) to Satan's plot, and he simply called the ceremony's hosts and told them to call it off once he was certain they would fail.

Live-Action TV

• In The A-Team episode "Hot Styles", thinking that Face wants to get back the fashion designs, Turian gloats that he's too late; Turian already mailed the film to his boss. However, Face then reveals that he tricked Turian into mailing the wrong film.
• Common on Doctor Who. Many are the villains who thought they'd gained the upper hand on The Doctor, only to find out that he'd fiddled with or Reversed the polarity of their doomsday weapon, and him giving them a final chance to surrender was his warning to them not to Kick the Dog. Their failure to listen to him causes their downfall.
• Very common on Hustle or Leverage, as befits shows about the good guys' conning the heck out of the villains (and audience).

Video Games

• In God of War (PS4), after Baldur kidnaps Atreus and escapes to the Temple of Tyr, Kratos arrives a second too late to stop him from starting the opening sequence for the Bifrost Bridge, which has been locked to Asgard. Aware that he can't stop the Bridge from opening, Kratos takes his chances and opens the Bridge early, which sends everyone present deep into Helheim and buys Kratos and Atreus enough time to get away from Baldur while they search for a way out.

Webcomics

• Starslip has future-Vanderbeam boobytrap his own time suit before fighting Katarakis - knowing he'll lose his suit, but Katarakis will fail because his engram has been compromised to use Vanderbeam's. - in lay speech, when Katarakis tries to rewrite reality moments before it begins, he erases the conditions necessary for humanity to develop a method of time travel in the first place. Vanderbeam is an art curator.

Western Animation

• The end of Reboot Season 3, when Megabyte triggers a portal to the Supercomputer to escape Mainframe, but Mouse converts the portal at the last second to instead send Megabyte to the Web. Though if you go through to Megabyte's return in Season 4/My Two Bobs, Mouse's actions only succeed in strengthening Megabyte.
• In "A Very Villainous Vacation" from Wallykazam, Victor ruins Mr. Trollman's sandcastle and threatens to ruin Norville's. Wally decides to save it by making it "vast" with his magic stick. Victor starts to stomp on it, saying that he's too late, but as it turns out he's not and it turns vast before Victor can stomp it away.

---

No twist; it's genuinely too late:

Advertising

• Clarks Shoes had an advert featuring an incompetent superhero named Captain Cobblers. He has until 4:00 to stop the Mad Scientist from transforming Linda Lovely into Linda Ugly but believes he has plenty of time, so he puts off the rescue. He arrives at one minute past four and is therefore too late to save her. To rub salt in the wound, when Cobblers regrets not having a watch, the villain announces Clarks Shoes can come with a cheap watch. Cue a Big "NO!" from Cobblers.

Anime and Manga

• Doubly Subverted during the eclipse in Berserk. Skull Knight pops in and saves Guts and Casca right before Griffith can pull the Coup de Grâce on them. However, by this time, both had suffered a Fate Worse than Death, and afterward the God Hand declared that they were going to bring forth an age of darkness.
• The death of L and Watari in Death Note. The evidence to prove that Light is Kira has finally been found and then Rem kills them. The good guys win in the end, anyway, though.
• In Devilman, this has happened to Akira Fudo several times. The biggest downer is the death of his Love Interest Miki Makimura murdered by a lynch mob, to the point he killed all of those involved. The series ends with one of the biggest Downer Endings in manga history.
• Fairy Tail: Despite Erza and Minerva killing Kyouka, it wasn't in time to stop Face as she forcefully finished the countdown sequence. Fortunately Grandeeney and three fellow Dragons were able to destroy all but a few of Face's 3000 pillars, saving Fiore from becoming a magicless land.
• Dio in the first arc of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Although he seemingly dies along with Jonathan, he comes back for an epic sequel in Part 3. And he isn't just alive - he successfully replaced his destroyed body with Jonathan's, meaning that he accomplished exactly what he was trying to do.
• The heroes of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory are dogged by this trope, between being unable to stop the nuke from being fired successfully to failing to prevent a Colony Drop.
  • Even worse, Jamitov Hymem and Bask Ohm use the entire incident as justification for the formation of the Titans. Everyone losses.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny, the heroes uncover a plot to Colony Drop the remains of Junius 7 onto Earth. Though they fight heroically to prevent it, they got there way too late, and it causes massive damage to a large portion of the world and reignites the war from the last series.
• Played straight in End of Evangelion, where Shinji arrives too late to save Asuka from being eaten alive, and as a result, gets to see the remains of her Evangelion Unit-02 being thrown on the ground. He is subsequently crucified by the MP EVAs.
  • Subverted in the Manga version, where Shinji does arrive in time to save Asuka from being eaten alive. He still gets crucified, though, and this time both Shinji and EVA-01 get giant holes in their hands.
    • And played with in Rebuild of Evangelion 2.22, where Kaworu arrives too late to prevent Shinji from initiating Third Impact and thus the end of the world, but arrives just in time to stop Shinji from letting it progress too far. Apparently, though, an alien piloting a giant alien in robot armor is able to throw a spear from above planetary orbit...
• While pretty much all the protagonists and side characters in the entire Planetes series are trying to prevent the Space Defence Force's attempt to crash an experimental space ship into the largest city on the moon, all their efforts end up failing when the SDF averts the crash themselves when their demands are met. And since unlike their methods, their demands were fairly reasonable (dividing space's resources among countries based on their population instead of how much contribution they paid the NATO-Expy, the end result isn't all that bad.

Comic Books

• The ending of the first Myth Arc of BIONICLE. Makuta Teridax is revealed to have been playing the heroes as Unwitting Pawns, taking possession of Mata Nui's body, a Humongous Mecha containing the whole Matoran World, during a crucial part of the process of reviving the Great Spirit so that when the Toa Nuva finally awoke Mata Nui, they woke it with his mind. Mata Nui's soul itself is placed inside the Mask of Life and jettisoned out into space.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: A Donald comic features Donald desperately trying to find and deliver a recycled can of soda to the soda manufacturer, thereby making his total number of returned cans ten thousand and granting him a yacht to a tropical island. He arrives just a few seconds too late, and is greeted by the manufacturer with this line.
• The Incredible Hulk: The "Ground Zero" storyline of Peter David's run. Hulk finds a Gamma Bomb planted in the middle of a small town by the Leader. He fights off the Leader's guards, and is about to disable the bomb—when it blows up.
• In the 2009 DCU one-shot "Faces of Evil: Kobra", the new leader of the Kobra cult is broadcasting to the world his intentions to transform the organization and kill everyone associated with his predecessor. He does this from within a Checkmate base, where earlier in the issue, Superman had delivered a bunker full of half-reptilian Half-Human Hybrid babies rescued from the predecessor's Tyke-Bomb program. As the new Kobra prepares to execute the infants, Superman takes off from the JLA satellite, but finds only flaming rubble when he arrives at what used to be the Checkmate base, making it apparent that the broadcast was not live.
• The Sinestro Corps War, Hal Jordan realizes too late that the Guardians' new authorization for the Green Lantern Corps to kill was the whole reason Sinestro started the war in the first place, meaning The Bad Guy Wins. However, even Jordan acknowledges at the end that the ability to use lethal force like real cops and soldiers does help in defending the universe.
• Watchmen, the former Trope Namer:
  "Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago."
  • If you go back and look you can see that Moore and Gibbons were shoving it in your face the whole time. The two "concurrent" scenes are filled with clocks.
  • The story gives a glimmer that his plan may yet at least be exposed, potentially mitigating its intended result, but the story ends before it can be explored. Though mitigating the intended result of the villain's plan would almost certainly make things even worse.
  • Rorschach (2020) — an official Distant Sequel to Watchmen — has a funny Call-Back to this during the final issue, where the nameless detective protagonist is informed that he's too late... by a movie theatre cashier, letting him know that the midnight screening he wanted to see started thirty-five minutes ago.
• Wonder Woman (1987): Diana confronts her mother after realizing there was some kind of trick behind the events of The Contest and realizes both that Artemis' life is in danger and that Diana's newest friend is Circe, who branwashed herself in a plan gone awry. Di is able to get Circe to help her get to Artemis to save her but is only in time for Artemis to die in her arms.
• In Assassin's Creed: Brahman, Assassin Arbaaz Mir arrives to stop Templar General Francis Cotton from poisoning Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Sikh Empire, by slapping the poisoned drink out of his hands. However, he had already drunk from the cup, and his death means the British, and by extension the Templars, will be able to takeover India.
• Mighty Avengers: As part of the scheme of The Four Who Rule, Blade is trussed up and has his blood drained. He reveals he was only holding back so he could figure out their plans, and busts free. Only the Four Who Rule have already gotten what they need from his blood, and their plan has therefore (technically) succeeded.
• Ultimate Vision: In the first world where the Vision landed. Alien scientists had been years trying to decipher the warning, made in a language from another alien world. When they finally did, they had just three months before the coming of Gah Lak Tus. No time for any resistance plan.
• In the second issue of the Invader Zim comic, Dib travels deep into space to stop Zim from activating an ancient alien war relic. When he tackles Zim in the control room gloating about how he saved the world, Zim alerts Dib that he already activated the machine and the only thing Dib managed to interrupt was him admiring his victory. Fortunately (depending on how you look at it), it turns out to not actually be a weapon, but a giant transmitter array, which Zim is just using to broadcast embarrassing footage of Dib across the universe.
• In an issue of Savage Sword of Conan, Conan is sent to rescue a princess from a horde of monsters. Conan manages to find the girl, but she tells him that the monsters have already done started the process that will eventually turn her into a brood mare for the monsters (Conan encountered and slew one earlier). She asks him to make sure she doesn't turn into one of those monsters. Conan complies.

Fan Works

• In A Northern Dragoness, Aemon the Dragonknight is sent to Lys to rescue a noblewoman who was abducted by pirates. The problem was that when he found her, the elderly lady had already been in Lys for sixty-five years. Though flattered by the rescue attempt and considering returning home to see her family, the lady had already established a small empire and had been living the good life for decades. Rechecking the original letter, Aemon finds that it was originally sent to Viserys I, his grandfather, gotten lost, and found out again without anyone realizing when it had been sent.
• In Game Theory, the TSAB is not able to stop Precia from completing her spell. Only it turns out that she had found a way to revive Alicia without traveling to Alhazred, and she had already carried it out successfully before the TSAB even got a chance to send their troops in. The entire confrontation on the Garden of Time was just a smokescreen so that Precia could fake her death. However, given that her goal was to bring her daughter back to life, her success can actually be considered a good thing.
• In The Miracle at Palaven a Mass Effect fanfic taking place during the period of Mass Effect 3, the Reapers fall victim to this from the heroes, the Turian/Krogan forces defending the Turian homeworld of Palaven. By the time that the Reapers figure out that these uprisings at the processing camps aren't isolated but coordinated, the suicide bomber squads carrying explosive WMDs have made it into them. A moment later, ninety one Reapers are obliterated from the inside nearly simultaneously: it is the titular Miracle at Palaven.
• Mastermind: Strategist for Hire: By the time Nedzu and the teachers arrive at the USJ, All Might is dead and the League of Villains, along with Izuku/Mastermind, have escaped.
• In Death Note Chaotic, when L and Light promise The Masked Man that they'll find a way to stop him from setting off nuclear bombs all over the planet, he tells them it already happened.

Film

• Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos starts the film having already decimated Xandar and taken the Power Stone before any Avenger caught wind of it, and quickly takes the Space Stone in the film’s opening scene. These two Infinity Stones alone, as Bruce Banner points out, already make him the strongest person in the universe thanks to their power and simple ability to teleport, respectively. Things only get worse as the film progresses and Thanos successfully retrieves the Reality and Soul Stones. By the time he arrives on Earth for the final Stone, it’s too late to stop him decisively, as he’s already taken the Time Stone. The only thing that could’ve been done to stop him was to destroy the Mind Stone before he could take it, and ultimately Wanda is forced to do it, destroying her lover Vision in the process. Thanos has none of it and simply uses the Time Stone to undo Vision’s death, just so he can take the Mind Stone and kill him himself, completing the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s briefly subverted when Thor arrives and is able to successfully get the jump on him immediately afterwards, but makes a fatal mistake in trying to deal Thanos a slow death, giving Thanos enough time to snap his fingers and complete his goal. Thanos even chides him, insisting he could have actually stopped him had he gone for his head.
  • In Avengers: Endgame, the Avengers go to find Thanos to take the Infinity Stones and undo the devastation he wrought, but find they were literally two days too late, as Thanos snapped again, this time to destroy the Stones and prevent anyone from undoing his culling. The Avengers were unable to arrive sooner since Thanos had fled into deep space, far beyond their reach and even Captain Marvel had no idea where he was, and even then, the Avengers did not have any spacecraft capable of making the journey to Thanos’s refuge until Marvel retrieved the Benatar while rescuing Tony Stark and Nebula. For the next five years, the Avengers are left to grieve their failure and the universe is left to grieve the massive loss of life.
• The end of the Count Yorga movies despite Yorga dying. In the first, he claims the protagonists' first female friend, Erica, and turns her into a vampire bride. Then hypnotizes Donna and lures her to his mansion. Micheal manages to reach her and kill Yorga. But Erica remains undead and in the end, Donna is revealed to have been turned too who instantly attack Micheal and kills him. The second movie, by the time the heroes have found out what going on, Yorga has killed most of their friends and amassed an army of female vampires (many of the girls whom he turns through the movie). In this case though, the last protagonist, Baldwin, manages to kill Yorga and prevent him from turning the damsel, Cythnia. But no sooner then Yorga is gone, that Baldwin is revealed to have turned and bites Cythnia shortly after.
• Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931) says this exactly to Van Helsing to assure him that his plans can no longer be foiled.
  • Dracula: You arrrr...too leit!
• It's revealed in the final confrontation that Simon Phoenix did this to John Spartan in Demolition Man before they were both frozen. Phoenix had already killed the hostages and chilled their bodies, so that Spartan wouldn't have known about them (via thermal scan) until after the inevitable explosion and so that Spartan would be blamed for their deaths when they were discovered.
• In Dr. Strangelove instead of them stopping the attack that would set off the doomsday weapon, they fail and a small amount of the population has to flee to underground bunkers in order to survive.
• Fight Club, the film version. Project Mayhem's plan to destroy a series of office buildings works, and the Narrator is too late to stop it. Although it's an odd case, as he was also the one trying to do it.
  • He did manage to get rid of Tyler, though.
• Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre. Lucy succeeds in killing Count Dracula via a Heroic Sacrifice, but Jonathan Harker is already a vampire and escapes at film's end. Adding insult to injury, police arrest Van Helsing for Dracula's "murder" at the movie's end!
• Happens to Harry in Speed when he arrives just in time at the building to be blown up by the bomb planted there as a diversion. It's not the showdown and the villain isn't there, though.
• Star Wars:
  • Episode V. Luke arrives on Cloud City too late to save Han and later the heroes race to save him from Boba Fett only to arrive as the ship takes off.
  • Episode III, anyone? Yoda loses. The Old Republic is in ruins, the Jedi have been slaughtered, Palpatine is triumphant. The only glimmer of hope for the galaxy lies in Padme's two children, who will go on to become the protagonists of the Original Trilogy.
• The Watchmen movie, much like the comic, has Ozymandias use this trope against Rorschach and Nite Owl: "I am not a comic book villain. I triggered it thirty-five minutes ago."
• In the climax of Warcraft (2016), Lothar speeds to save Llane and his men, but by the time he arrives, they've all been slaughtered and all Lothar can do is to take Llane's body back to Stormwind.
• In X-Men: Apocalypse, the X-Jet Blackbird's main turbine has just been hit by Havok's blast and it causes a huge explosion, but fortunately, Quicksilver has just arrived and gets everyone out of the blast radius, so they don't die. All except Havok, who was next to it and had already been caught by the explosion.
• Played for Laughs in Young Frankenstein:
  Dr. Frankenstein: [to Igor] Damn your eyes!
  Igor: [looks to camera and points to his eyes] Too late!

Literature

• Alderamin on the Sky: Kanna Temari's unit occupies an abandoned Sinack fortress high in the mountains, only to then be cut off and surrounded. A runner manages to get out and request reinforcements, and Ikta Solork leads his company to the rescue... but is forced to stop his march halfway up the mountain to give his troops time to acclimate to the altitude, something no other Imperial unit in the theatre knew to do, Kanna's included. By the time Ikta reaches the fortress, the Sinack have broken back in and slaughtered the entire Imperial garrison to a man.
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Shadows In The Moonlight", in Olivia's dream, when the son calls on his father, his torturers cut his throat and kill him before his Physical God father appears. Of course, it's not too late to invoke Taken for Granite.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: With a book and a half spent trying to prevent the wall from falling, it collapses days before the cast would have been ready to reinforce it.
• In Debt of Honor, Clark and Chavez arrive too late to extract Kimberly Norton, only managing to find her raped and murdered corpse.
• In Dracula, Van Helsing realizes it's too late to save Lucy from turning into a vampire when the bite wounds on her neck suddenly close up and heal on their own, her canines suddenly sprout fangs briefly followed by her uncharacteristically calling for Arthur to kiss her in a seductive tone.
• In Players of Gor (book 20) Cabot learns of a plot by Cos, Tyros, Brundisium and certain factions in Ar to attack Ar. He gets the evidence, then learns that it's actually happening right now. The evidence is now worthless so he burns it.
• In Daniel Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, the Diabolical Mastermind villain succeeds at destroying a Cosmic Keystone by having a backup orangutan eat it while the heroes were busy capturing him and the other orangutan. The consequence of this is that all the licensed realtors in the United States are possessed by extraterrestrials.
• In the novelization of the Terran Campaign of the game StarCraft, Danny Liberty talks with Arcturus Mengsk about sending Kerrigan to place the Psi Emitter, which the rebels on Antiga Prime need to lure more Zerg to break the Confederate blockade so they could escape:
  Danny Liberty: But the emitter will only amplify. You need a telepath to...Kerrigan. You're going to use Kerrigan to bring in the Zerg.
  Arcturus Mengsk: Very good.
  Dan: You can't do that! You want her to break into a Confederate camp? She'll never make it.
  Arcturus: I have a high degree of confidence in the lieutenant.
  Dan: You can't do that!
  Arcturus: You have your tense wrong. I gave the orders for the operation before we sat down for our first game. The good lieutenant should be picking up the emitter in the shops right about now. If you hurry, you can catch up with her.
• In Tales from a Galaxy Far, Far Away Volume 1: Aliens: The Crimson Corsair and the Lost Treasure of Count Dooku, the titular treasure is cryo-frozen clone trooper CT-6116 "Kix", who has unearthed a conspiracy to brainwash the clone army into annihilating the Jedi Order as part of a larger plan to conquer the galaxy. Too bad he's woken up fifty years too late to save anyone with this information.
  Quiggold: That was certainly priceless information, Pendewqell. I bet the Galactic Republic will be super happy now that they can stop the Emperor from rising to power. Probably save the galaxy a whole lot of lives, too. Maybe we can go to the Jedi Council and get a nice fat reward! So all we need to do now is travel back in time! What do you say-?

Live-Action TV

• One particularly memorable episode of Babylon 5 has the doctor engaged in a Race Against the Clock to stop The Plague that is about to wipe out an entire species. He discovers a cure, and just when you expect a Just in Time ending, the doors to the quarantine zone are opened to reveal Everybody's Dead, Dave. It's not completely meaningless, since the disease had spread to other species by then, but the entire Markab civilization has been wiped out.
• A heroic example appears in Doctor Who. In the final moments of the Eleventh Doctor's life, he is out of Regenerations, and facing an army of Daleks. Suddenly, thanks to the Time Lords granting him a new set of Regenerations, he begins a whole new cycle. The Daleks begin to call for his Extermination in a panicked state, but as the Doctor says:
  The Doctor: You think you can stop me now? IF YOU WANT MY LIFE...COME. AND. GET. IT!
• This is basically how FlashForward (2009) ended; the protagonists were too late to prevent the second blackout and all the disastrous effects of the first one can be considered to have been repeated (although they were in time to broadcast a warning that probably saved millions of lives). Since the show was cancelled and the writers didn't have time to resolve the story, this probably would ultimately have turned into an example of 2, 3, or 4, but as it stands we have no idea what was supposed to happen.
• A Monty Python sketch features an Action Hero called The Bishop who repeatedly tries to stop assassinations of clergymen but always arrives just too late.
• Odd Squad: The Season 3 mid-season finale "End of the Road" has the Mobile Unit finally reaching The Shadow, Brutus, and the rest of the villains...just as said villains have all finished transferring their powers into the cube. Luckily they manage to reform The Shadow so the plan is never completed.
• One episode of the BBC Robin Hood — Robin Hood and his men attempt a Big Damn Heroes moment to save Allan a Dale's brother and his band of thieves, who are about to be hanged. When they arrive and hide in the shadows, the Sheriff gloatingly reveals that he had hung the group hours ago, since he knew Robin would be here for a dramatic rescue at noon. Instead of saving the condemned men, Robin is staring at already-dead corpses dangling from ropes while the Sheriff laughs.
• Scrubs: In "My Princess", Dr. Cox tells about his day at the hospital to his son in the form of a bedtime story. In the story, a maiden is being terrorized by a monster and is saved in time, but in reality, it's a disease killing a patient, and it's implied that she was diagnosed too late.
• In Smallville, "Veritas", Brainiac tells Kal-El he is too late to save Lana. By possessing her catatonic body For the Evulz. Clark closes her eyes and starts to cry. Watching from a distance, so does Chloe. Alas, Poor Scrappy. While Clark would eventually deal with Brainiac, it is far enough to be counted as The Bad Guy Wins...for now.
• An odd twist to this trope happens in the Deep Space Nine episode "The Visitor", where an elderly Jake Sisko informs his stuck-in-time father that the only way to get him unstuck is for Jake to commit suicide at a certain time. We then realize what that "medicine" was that Jake took at the beginning of the episode.
  • In the episode, "The Sound of Her Voice", the crew of the Defiant races against time to rescue the sole survivor of a crashed Starfleet vessel. She's on a planet with a toxic atmosphere and she has a limited supply of the medicine that can counteract it. And they find out later that a good chunk of her medicine has been compromised, meaning they may not get there in time to save her even at max warp. When they finally find her, they find remains that have been dead for years. The planet's odd atmosphere caused a time warp that sent the survivors communications into the future and their's back to her. She was already dead by the time they first got her signal.
• An interesting example in Supernatural: Ruby succeeds in tricking Sam into releasing the Devil (at which point she is superfluous), and then Dean comes through the door.
  Demon: You're too late!
  Dean: I don't care. [stabs the demon]
• Very well done in season 8 of 24, Jack Bauer and his team are storming the base where the terrorists are holding President Hassan, while President Taylor watches what she thinks is a live feed of his "trial". Except the feed is pre-recorded and Hassan was already dead before Jack entered the building. The Big Bad and all his men are killed or captured, but they still succeeded in their ultimate goal.
  • Played With in the 4th episode of season 6: the bad guys spend the entire episode preparing a bomb to lay waste to Washington D.C., and the good guys manage to burst in just as the villains are finished setting it up, leading to a Hope Spot that they'll be able to stop it (and, indeed, they do end up shooting a few mooks guarding it). Ultimately played straight, though, as the last remaining villain manages to set the nuke off before they can stop him, and the bomb ends up killing everyone in the area. All 12,000 of them.
• Walker, Texas Ranger: "The Brotherhood" has Walker dealing with a pack of Dirty Cops who aim to kill off arrested people who managed to get off on technicalities, and he would warn them their malicious and extremist actions would result in an innocent person being killed. The victim of this case was Ernesto Lopez, who turned his life around after Walker got him out of gangs in a previous episode and went on to join the Marines and seek to win the affections of a Congressman's daughter currently attending law school. Ernesto was accused of a rape that took place one night he was seeing his prospective bride and DNA tests ultimately exonerated him, but the dirty cops kill him before Walker could find him and tell him the good news, and Walker is the first Ranger to arrive on the scene when Ernesto's body is found by honest cops. Cue a Big "NO!" from Ernesto's heartbroken mother after Walker tells her the bad news!

Radio

• The Goon Show ends one episode with the time bomb version:
  Seagoon: Three seconds? I've got to get out of here!
  [fx: running feet]
  Narrator: Will Seagoon get out in time?
  [fx: kabooom]
  Narrator: Oh, hard luck. Still, he tried.

Tabletop Games

• In the Pathfinder campaign "Tyrant's Grasp"^note the last published Adventure Path to use the 1st Edition ruleset, the adventurers learn that the Whispering Tyrant has a magical superweapon called the Radiant Fire, and his most likely next target is the city of Vigil which houses the last remaining seal keeping him imprisoned. By the time the party gathers enough proof of the Radiant Fire's existence for the civic leaders to justify a full evacuation, the Tyrant unleashes it on Vigil and kills many thousands of people, setting himself free to wreak havoc on the world while turning the city into a blasted urban wasteland filled with undead.^note It should still be noted that if the party is successful in convincing the leaders to at least consider the Radiant Fire a credible threat, then they manage to protect and evacuate most of the survivors.
• Happened in the backstory of Warhammer 40,000 in which the Ultramarines, Space Wolves and Dark Angels Space Marine legions are being stalled by the traitor legions as much as possible while the Siege of Terra rages on. The three legions eventually arrive at Terra, only to find out that the traitor legions had already fled into the Eye of Terror and that the Emperor had been mortally wounded.
  • But it should be noted that the fact that the space marine legions were going to arrive and help forced Horus to speed up his plan and ultimately get killed.

Theater

• Tanz Der Vampire lets Professor Abronsius and his assistant Alfred believe they've saved the beautiful Sarah from the clutches of the vampire lord Graf von Krolock, complete with a dramatic getaway from the ball where she was the Graf's main course. All seems well, and Alfred and Sarah embrace, at which point Sarah reveals a shiny new pair of fangs and attacks Alfred, draining him and making him a vampire too. The rest of the vampires then arrive to claim the audience themselves as their new prey...

Video Games

• In Assassin's Creed II, Ezio arrives at the Doge's palace too late to stop Carlo Grimaldi poisoning him, and though the Templar is killed, the Doge dies anyway and another Templar, Marco Barbarigo, is installed as the new Doge. For now, anyway.
• In Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, you are too late to prevent Yaga-Shura from burning down Saradush and slaughtering its inhabitants. At least you get to add him and his army to the tally of people killed during the siege shortly afterwards.
• Subverted in Chrono Trigger, in that you arrive too late to prevent Marle from being deleted from the timeline, but you are Just in Time to prevent the event that deletes her. I hate time travel.
  • Played straight if you get killed by Lavos, who continues in his near-destruction of the planet, and text displays on the screen reading "But the future refused to change."
• Diablo:
  • In the first game, when you finally confront the Archbishop Lazarus, he informs you that you are too late to save the child — perhaps redundantly, as the child in question is present and quite visibly dead, having been used as a Human Sacrifice. The realization that the child isn't the kidnapped Prince Albrecht you're looking for provides a Hope Spot until eventually you defeat Diablo himself, revealing that he was possessing the Prince to take physical form. Due to a bit of More than Mind Control, your character then decides it would be a brilliant idea to contain Diablo's soul in their own body, and jams the Soulstone into their head, eventually becoming the Dark Wanderer and Diablo's Final Boss incarnation in the sequel.
  • The second game features the player trying to chase down Baal and the Dark Wanderer, respectively, Acts II and III both end on this note. Duriel, the Act II boss, taunts you saying:
    "Looking for Baal?"
  • Mephisto points this out as well when you confront him at the end of Act III:
    "You're too late! Ahahahahaha!"
  • It happens again — twice — in the Lord of Destruction expansion. You have to stop Baal from getting to the Worldstone or all is lost. First, you fail to stop Nihlathak from handing over the Relic of the Ancients to Baal so he can bypass the Ancients and get to the Worldstone Keep because he's already handed it over by the time you reach him. Then you battle and defeat Baal, only to learn after defeating him that he's already corrupted the Worldstone, forcing Tyrael to destroy it to keep humanity from being enslaved by Hell (although given the Worldstone's true purpose, this inadvertently sets up the happiest ending in the series).
• In Divine Divinity, the final quest is stopping the Demon of Lies from releasing the Lord of Chaos in the world of Rivellon. No matter how fast you are, you can't stop the ritual and the Demon of Lies will taunt you with these exact words.
• Dragon Quest IX sets you on a quest to stop a magical contagion with the aid of Dr. Phlegming. Everyone afflicted by the contagion becomes perfectly healthy once the heroes seal the curse...save for Dr. Phlegming's wife, Catarrhina, who passes away while the heroes and her husband are off to stop the contagion.
• The third level of Eternal Darkness. Anthony is corrupted by the evil magical scroll intended for Charlemagne, and he slowly becomes more and more zombified as you progress through the level, desperately trying to find Charlemagne and warn him that conspirators want him dead. At the end of the level, Anthony staggers into a room to find two of the evil monks standing over the king's corpse, slumped in a chair. Really, Eternal Darkness features a few examples of this sort of thing, but Anthony's is probably the best one.
• Final Fantasy. Constantly.
  • In Final Fantasy IV, you arrive too late to prevent Anna's death. And Golbez from collecting the crystals. And the summoning of the Giant of Bab-il. FF4 is quite full of fail on the part of the heroes.
  • In Final Fantasy V, you arrive too late to prevent the end of the universe but the universe reboots.
  • In Final Fantasy VI, you arrive too late to prevent the poisoning of Doma. And The End of the World as We Know It.
  • In Final Fantasy VII, you arrive too late to give Yuffie what-for because she's already been kidnapped. Or to save Aeris, or to save Sector 7, or to save Cloud's hometown, or (possibly) to save humanity from Meteor and/or Holy, or...
  • In Final Fantasy IX you are too late to prevent Brahne's attack on Lindblum.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, you arrive too late to prevent St. Ajora's resurrection.
• In The Godfather game, you arrive too late to prevent Sonny's death and can only avenge him by fighting his killers and finding the man responsible.
  • And earlier on, you also fail to prevent your girlfriend's death. But like the previous example, you also have to find and kill the responsible.
• Guild Wars 2 has Scarlet Briar invoke this trope with her dying breath. The players killed her, but she still succeeded in her goal of rupturing a leyline to wake the sixth Elder Dragon.
  Scarlet: You fools. You think my death... saves you? Too... late...
• Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death: Judge Dredd attacks the Death Cult's hide-out at the docks to stop the resurrection of the Dark Judges, but their leader has already completed the ritual giving them physical bodies and taunts Dredd thus. The monsters escape, but the player can still shoot Death's priest.
• This can (and a lot of the time will) happen in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Because every event in the game is on a timer very often Link will find himself unable to stop Sakon getting away, not being able to stop aliens stealing the ranch's cattle and in the worst case failing to stop the moon colliding into Termina and eradicating all life. It can be a severe Player Punch to rush to an event in progress only to be too late to intervene.
• Master of Magic intro movie. Non-villainous example, but still:
  Tauron: Old man! You seek the spell of mastery!
  Merlin: You have come too late... my work has already met with success.
  Tauron: If that is the truth... then your work must stop.
  (large fireworks ensue)
• In Mega Man Zero the title character is exceptionally bad at this. In Zero 2 he chases Elpizo during the failed attack on Neo Arcadia to save him, only to find the Four Guardians standing over his body. Later in the same game he is again chasing Elpizo, this time to stop him from killing X. He arrives just in time to watch Elpizo destroy his friend's body. In Zero 3 he tries to stop a missile from destroying a human inhabited part of Neo Arcadia...doesn't quite make it in time. And in Zero 4 he is standing at the boss door when Ragnarok fires, destroying Neo Arcadia.
  • Of course, this does make the vengeance a bit sweeter when you beat the boss in question.
• The rule of thumb of anything concerning Revolver Ocelot of the Metal Gear series, the moment you're even minorly involved, you're helping his plans along and you won't know it even if you could read minds. Old Snake stopped Ocelot and prevented JD's nuking, but since it is Ocelot, it was either part of the plan or he had a contingency for such an occassion. In the end, your ultimate goal is achieved, which is to say you accomplished Ocelot's objective, which is to liberate the world from The Patriots' control.
• In Modern Warfare, the climax of the U.S. assault on the unnamed Middle Eastern country occurs when the player's marine squad fail to find Al-Asad in the broadcast center, while a simultaneous attack by SEAL Team 6 has found a live nuclear bomb in his palace. An epic scene ensues when every unit still in the city scrambles to make it onto helicopters and out of the blast radius, but the SEAL team fails to defuse the bomb and the player's heli is knocked out of the air by the blast wave.
  • Also, the next level has you crawling around in the aftermath of the nuke. Then you die.
• In one sidequest of Ori and the Will of the Wisps, a Moki father who has just arrived in Wellspring Glades sends Ori to check on his family back in the Silent Woods. Unfortunately, by the time Ori arrives, The Corruption has already turned them to stone, and upon hearing the news, he returns home to be petrified alongside them.
• Stocke of Radiant Historia often finds himself in this situation, considering that the game is one long chain of Setting Right What Once Went Wrong across two different timelines.
• In Rainbow Six Vegas 2's Act 3-2, Bishop's squad arrives too late to prevent the detonation of the gas bomb in the Arena, and all you can do is listen to the screams of the dying hostages behind the locked door.
• In Rift, the Defiant player characters are too late to stop Regulos thanks to the Guardians smashing the Defiants' capital city to tiny bits. The player character is simply buying enough time to get themselves to a time machine that will give them a chance to make sure the Bad Future they're in never starts. They succeed but mere moments after stepping through all of Regulos' minions slaughter the remaining Defiant stronghold since they had to power down their defenses in order to give the time machine enough juice.
• Downplayed in Scrap Metal Heroes with Mobius' plan to overthrow humanity by controlling the world's robots with a computer virus. When you confront him in the final mission, he states that the process of uploading the virus has already started. While you do defeat him and stop him from overthrowing humanity, the computer virus launches anyway, halting most of the world's robots and throwing the world economy into chaos.
• Can be averted in Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair, when the group rushes to the basement to try to save Kotoba. If you make even one mistake, you will take too long and Kotoba will die. If, however, you make all the right choices, Kotoba will barely pull through, and you'll earn an achievement.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic has a nasty one on the Consular's arc. A senator is captured from your ship. Your Mad Scientist companion and his holographic assistant do an epic job of tracking the kidnapper's location. Crippling his ship, you and the Senator's daughter (and, at that point, unofficial Padawan) burst in as a pair of lightsaber-packing Big Damn Heroes. Not only are you too late to save your Padawan's daddy, but the kidnapper is a Sith so screwed up and broken he can't recall his own name, and the Big Bad leaves him a broken and babbling wreck on the floor once he's expended his use. So, the Senator's dead, you get no useful information from the kidnapper, and your pupil commits a Dark Side act by killing what's left of daddy's murderer before you can stop her.
• Can cause a Non Standard Game Over in The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo if the player waits too long to call for a ride home. Their mother takes at least an hour to arrive, and the titular uncle arrives at midnight to devour the player, so if they haven't called their mother by 11:00 pm, they're in for a world of hurt.
• When the teens in Until Dawn realize the danger they're in, they call the forest rangers. Naturally, they can't arrive until dawn, when the storm lets up. When they finally do, every threat has already been neutralized in some way or another. Depending on how many of the kids survived, the rangers might not have anything to do but put out a fire.
• The Watchmen Video Game shows this quite often:
  • Rorschach and Night Owl come to stop a jail break, the guy escaped 5 minutes before they could get there. Also the power comes on and Dr. Manhattan arrives too late.
  • They arrive to late to save the FBI agent from revealing where he was to meet the reporters on the Watergate scandal.
  • They try to save Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein from being killed, they are already dead when they arrive.
  • They go to save Violet Greene from the sex trade, they already have her convinced to stay when they finally arrive.
• Wizard101 has a few cases of this trope, for the Malistaire arc this is the case for three of the five worlds involved. But a truely shocking one happen for the chapter where the player explores Azteca and completely fails to stop the villain. The villain succeeds in destroying Azteca with a comet resulting in the deaths most of its inhabitants.

Webcomics

• Bob and George Only a few moments too late.
• In Dracula: Ruler of the Night, the hunters have tracked Dracula to Carfax Abby and search for him. To their surprise they come across Minerva Westenra, Lucy's mother, who was initially out of town but was set to come back home after receiving the telegram about Lucy failing health. They check her over and don't seem to find any bite marks, assuming they got to her in time. Eventually, however they're forced to retreat when Dracula and his brides (Lucy now among them) prove too powerful to fight at night. They make their way into a cellar of the building and have to push on the door leading outside as it's blocked by debris while barring the other door to keep the vampires from getting in, though know it won't take long for them to break through. Regardless, Harker assures Minerva that they'll protect her...only to catch glimpse off a reflective surface and find only her clothes are floating in the air. Exposed, Minerva sprouts fangs and pointy ears, informing him that Drac's brides had intercepted her carriage, brought her to Dracula and she was quickly bitten by Lucy. Becoming his most recent bride only hours before the hunters had raided the building.
• The end of Act 5 in Homestuck. The first person to realize what has happened is Rose, in [S] Cascade. They already know something is wrong because they haven't found the Green Sun, but it takes her about five minutes of staring at The Tumor before she realizes what it is, and just seconds before it explodes and kills her and Dave the reader is given a close-up of her eyes widening.
• In Looking for Group, Cale and The Cavalry make a dramatic Gondor Calls for Aid march to the North to help their allies fend off an invasion from The Empire, only to find that the defending forces have already been soundly defeated, the city and fortifications burned to the ground, and the remaining survivors in retreat.
• Scurry:
  • Pict finds out that Resher is conspiring with the cats to ambush Wix's scouting party. She manages to escape Resher's goons and runs to warn the party, only to arrive and find the cats have already struck, leaving only Wix and a badly-injured Kessel still alive.
  • Pict (whom the author notes has the worst luck with this sort of thing) discovers that the ravens are A) Part of a death cult and B) sabotaging the beaver dam. Pict is captured by the crows, but word still manages to get to the beavers. Just in time for the dam to start to fail.
  • Wix finds out that Resher has been secretly poisoning Master Orim, and stops Pict from giving him some more, but by then he has already taken a fatal dose and dies regardless.
• Subverted in They All Laughed (Project Apollo.net)
  Marigold: Oh hohohohoho! So you've finally come, Ray Vincent! But how unfortunate that You're Too Late! My sinister plan for world domination is now unstoppable! Forget saving the world — you'll be lucky to save the taste of bitter defeat!
  Michelle: Wait a minute, what "sinister plan"? Your only plan for today was to watch soap operas and eat cookie dough ice crmmmph!
  Marigold: Ha ha ha ha! Er, a sinister secret plan!
• Unsounded: At Litrya after Sette gets separated from Sara, Siya and Ilia she runs to Duane to beg him to save her friends. By the time he gets to the subterranean Inaktown the entire cavern is blocked off and flooded with not only Sara and Ilia dead but also all of the Inak, Ruffles left as the sole survivor of her hometown by dint of just missing the explosion. Duane is not only unable to prevent the deaths of any innocents, his earlier actions allowed and caused their deaths. He then flees back up to try to warn Lemuel of the Silver Weapon but is unable to do that either. Jivi also tries to return to help but is even later.

Web Original

• In DEATH BATTLE!, this trope is used during the climax of Darth Vader VS Obito Uchiha. Just when it looks like Darth Vader has Obito on the ropes, the latter responds with a simple remark of "Too late.", revealing that the Infinite Tsukuyomi was cast from the God Tree, trapping the Sith Lord in the dream world and leaving him wide open to a deathblow.
• Tex's attempted rescue of the Alpha in Red vs. Blue is this. She teams up with York to try to get him out of the Director's clutches, but by the time she breaks back in, Alpha has already shed his memories (in the form of Epsilon) and no longer even remembers her. They do end up together again later, but he doesn't remember what happened for years, until he comes in contact with Epsilon again, at which point Tex has already been taken by the Meta and dies just a few episodes later.
  • This trope is pretty much everything that Alpha!Tex is made of. She is an AI that is basically doomed to always arrive too late and fail when it matters most because her husband, the template for Alpha, was trying to resurrect a dead woman who, in as of yet unknown ways, failed and died while on a mission.
• The Wham Line of SCP-2317 indicates that there is no way to stop SCP-2317 when the last chain breaks, and it will break sometime in the next century. All the previous containment procedures listed are just false flags so people don't realize The End of the World as We Know It is inevitable.
• Arc 4 of Twig has the protagonists chasing Genevieve Fray, a disgruntled prospective faculty member of an Academy of Evil, over the course of a month, only for her to comment that she's already started and concluded her overall plan before she even left the Academy, and everything else she's been doing has just been improving the effects. Three chapters later, they realize that she had distributed Academy chemicals in the water supplies of every town they'd followed her through, imposing the Academy's chemical leash on entire populations and effectively making them reliant on their local Academy branches for survival.

Western Animation

• Season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender sees the Gaang rushing to prevent Iroh's warnings of Azula launching a coup from coming true, only to discover that the groundwork she had laid for the coup and Zuko's subversion of the Heel–Face Turn was so far along that they couldn't stop it, and when Aang tried to enter the Avatar State to enact the traditional Curb-Stomp Battle, Azula realized that Transformation Is ''Not'' A Free Action and shot him in the back before he could power up. Consequently, the actual ending of the season was Azula taking over Ba Sing Sei (effectively realizing the Fire Nation's goal of conquering the world), Anti-Villain Zuko turning back to the dark side, and a comprehensively defeated Avatar Aang. If it hadn't been for Season 3 coming along, it would have been a truly Olympian Downer Ending.
• The second season finale of Beast Wars ended with Megatron basically erasing the Maximals from existence. Season three had them fix it, but not every region got that part.
• Happened in the Captain Planet episode "Whoo Gives a Hoot". The Planeteers attempt to stop Looten Plunder with a court injunction against clear-cutting an old-growth forest. Despite their success in finding what they need to stop the cutting, Looten's clumsy, stupid minions actually managed to succeed in stealing the evidence, leaving Plunder free to continue. The Planeteers and judge eventually discover Looten's deception, only to discover that Looten had already cut down all the trees. The episode ends on that note, with him laughing in their faces about it and daring them to try and stop him again.
• This happens in Seasons 2 and 3 of Code Lyoko (and the end of Season 1 wasn't very happy either). The heroes have to spend each season undoing what XANA did in the previous season, and he becomes stronger each time.
• Dora the Explorer has Swiper the Fox. He is the God of this trope. Of course, his schemes are more Poke the Poodle, and Dora and Boots manage to retrieve what he's taken from them anyway.
  • In cases like this, they usually just didn't say "Swiper, no swiping!" fast enough. Swiper doesn't succeed half the time.
• Played straight for comedy in the Phineas and Ferb episode "That Sinking Feeling".
  "You know what, Perry the Platypus, I think it's time for you to go. That's right, go on, your services are no longer required. The lighthouse is gone and there's nothing you can do about it, so you might as well run back to Major Monogram and tell him you lost this one."
  • Turns into the third kind of this trope in The Stinger when the lighthouse, which Dr. Doofenshmirtz turned into a rocket and launched in order to get rid of the foghorns keeping him awake at night, crashes into his building as he's trying to fall asleep.
• The Powerpuff Girls are given a specific amount of time to solve Him's riddles in "Him Diddle Riddle" or, in Him's words, "the Professor will pay!" The girls fail on the final riddle, and the Professor must indeed pay—full price for a pancake breakfast at Him's diner. (The episode was executed in real-time.)
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: In season 4, the shapeshifter Double Trouble is found after they raise suspicion by destroying the Princess Alliance's communicator. It is revealed that they didn't misstep, they just needed to cut off outside alerts and keep the group busy looking for them while Hordak attacks Salineas. By the time they're captured, the kingdom of Salineas fell hours ago.
• In the first episode of Superman: The Animated Series, Jor-El tries to find proof that Brainiac has been deceiving the Council about the danger Krypton is in. Brainiac admits that he has, but it doesn't matter now, because the planet won't survive the night.
• In the first red sky episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), Shredder gives the turtles a 30-minute time limit to give him Krang, or the Channel 6 building will explode with April and friends inside. Arriving a minute late, seeing the building still there, they think Shredder was bluffing, only to witness the building explode a second later. Fortunately, Splinter snuck in and saved all of the employees before the explosion. But still...

Real Life

• During the sinking of the RMS Titanic, the Carpathia raced with everything she had to get to the emergency, but the captains of the respective ships knew that she could never make it in time. She arrived some two hours after the Titanic had sunk. This is somewhat of a subversion, though, because the Carpathia did arrive in time to rescue 705 survivors from the lifeboats.

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