Set Right What Once Went Wrong / Comic Books

Setting Right What Once Went Wrong in Comic Books

Series Plots

• Exiles was supposedly pitched as Quantum Leap or Sliders with superheroes.
• Booster Gold does this quite a bit as the secret protector of the time line. It's when he has to set wrong what once went right or keep wrong what once went wrong that things get really morally complicated for him.
• In Civil War storyline, the entire event was kicked off when Namorita, a member of the New Warriors, fought a villain named Nitro whose ability was to explode. Said explosion killed hundreds, including Namorita herself. Because of this, Namorita's name was posthumously slandered with the rest of the New Warriors, much to the chagrin of her ex-lover, Richard Ryder aka Nova, even though they'd been broken up for years at that point. In his eponymous series, Nova is plucked out of the timestream along with a Namorita who is obviously from an era not only before the Civil War incident, but while she and Ryder were still lovers. Later, when the cosmic forces that threw them together start to send them back where they belong, Nova (being a Paragon-type character), refuses to let Namorita return to her own time (where she'll be doomed to repeat the same fate) and brings her to the present instead... consequences be damned.
• In an issue of Marvel Two-in-One, the Thing goes back in time to cure his past self of being an orange-skinned monster and change his own life, but only succeeds in creating an alternate timeline where a now-human Ben Grimm quits the Fantastic Four and is replaced by Spider-Man. This becomes Make Wrong What Once Went Right in a follow-up story, when it is revealed that the absence of the Thing on the FF results in Galactus succeeding in his initial attempt to feed on the Earth, leaving the remnants of humanity with a Crapsack World low in vital resources.
• In H'el on Earth, the main antagonist, H'el, wants to travel back in time to before his home planet Krypton exploded, and prevent its destruction. However, the energy needed for the time travel would destroy our entire solar system. Not that H'el cares about our solar system.
• In Age of Ultron, Wolverine decides to go back in time and kill Hank Pym, who created the robot Ultron which would annihilate humanity in the present. However, by killing Hank Pym, Wolverine creates a new dystopian timeline where the Avengers disbanded because of Pym's death, and Morgan le Fay is constantly threatening the small part of the world she hasn't conquered yet. He then travels back in time and prevents himself from killing Pym, but now makes Pym create a way to destroy Ultron when necessary.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation mini-series, The Last Generation, the Federation has collapsed because the Khitomer Accords from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country were never created as the Federation President was assassinated. After the last real bastion of the Federation discovers the android Data, who has realized this timeline is not the real one, they have to go back in time to make sure the Accords are created, stopping a Make Wrong What Once Went Right plot in the process.
• In Seconds, the red mushrooms give Katie this ability, which she starts to irresponsibly abuse and ends up sending everything to hell.
• In Lilith, in the far future humanity has been banished from the surface of Earth by the Triacanto, a parasite that dwelled inside human bodies for millennia until, in the Great Germination, it emerged and took over the surface. To prevent this, the protagonist Lyca (who takes the name Lilith during her mission) is sent back in time to cut off any line of growth by extracting it from the various Patients Zero before they can infect more people-and to hell to any alteration to history she has to do to reach her target (indeed, the only time she doesn't change history in some way is her first stint in World War I, when anyone she kills would have died at that time anyway during the Battle of Caporetto). It is a recurring plot point that, whenever she travels to a point in time after one of her previous interventions, the history she finds is different from what it would have been, such as The Iliad narrating of Achilles' being blinded by Artemis (the result of Lilith, in her first mission, blinding the Achaian warrior that would inspire Achilles' character) or the Aztecs defeating Cortes thanks to iron weapons and resistance to smallpox acquired from the Vikings (that had contacted them when Lilith enlisted Leif Erikson's help to chase down a bearer of the Triacanto, with Lilith telling them the American natives would pay a lot for those weapons).
• Ultimate Marvel:
  • The Ultimates: Red Skull big plan is to use the Cosmic Cube to go back in time to WWII and prevent his father, Captain America, from being frozen in the arctic, so they can grow up like a normal family.
  • Ultimate X Men: Apocalypse created a Bad Future, but Cable and Bishop go back in time and set up events to prevent his timeline from happening.
• In The Infinite, freedom fighter Bowen goes back in time to team up with his younger self to take down the brutal regime that took over his world before it can seize power.
• In The Last West, Robert Whittenheimer is trying to figure out what went wrong with his grandfather's atom bomb, believing that it is the key to ending America's technological stagnation.
• Subverted in Way of the World. When Supergirl gets a time-travelling device and feels tempted by the opportunity to fix all her mistakes. Upon reflection, though, she decides that the past is the past and she must accept this and move on.
  Supergirl: I can go back. I can go back and give them the device before they die. They can still use it. They can still go back and be with him. Or I could go back. Go back even further. With enough time...maybe I could save him. Or even...I could save them all. Do it all over again. All my mistakes— So many mistakes. I could do it right this time. I would know everything. I would be perfect.
• Sonic the Comic has a unique example of an antagonist fixing a wrong in the past to advance their agendas.The Brotherhood of Metallix traveled back in time and prevented the Freak Lab Accident that transformed kind veterinarian Ovi Kintobor into the evil Ivo Robotnik. As the doctor played an integral role aiding Sonic and the Freedom Fighters in opposing the faction, this created a Bad Future where the Brotherhood conquered Mobius and renamed it "Planet Metallix". Sonic then went back and Set Wrong What Was Once Made Right, leaving us with the disturbing knowledge that the hero is responsible for unleashing a great evil in the series, even if it was to prevent a greater evil from taking place.

Episode or Character Plots

• Rayek from ElfQuest travels to the future in an attempt to 'save' his space-travelling ancestors from being thrown back in time and crashing on the planet. Unfortunately, all their descendants currently living on this planet will then cease to exist — and will never have existed, since their ancestors will never have set foot on the planet in the first place. Opinions about whether or not this is a good thing differ — he thinks it's good, everyone else thinks it's bad. Who cares about other men's opinion anyway. He tried to compromise by having the people he actually knew and cared about stay inside the palace, which would protect them from the history-wiping effects... but since this would only save the people standing immediately in front of him, and still wipe out everyone else on the planet, they refused his offer. When confronted with the choice between annihilating everyone he ever loved, and preventing ten thousand years of suffering, he ends up suffering a BSOD and losing his powers.
• In the "Camelot Falls" storyline in the Superman comics, a prophetic sorcerer tells him what he needs to do to avert the extinction of humanity years down the line. In a subversion of this trope, Superman refuses to comply, namely because "what he needs to do" involves not preventing the deaths of countless innocents.
• Supergirl:
  • Subverted in storyline Way of the World. In the far future, Kara Zor-El has the chance to travel back to the past. She thinks of fixing all of her mistakes and doing it right this time... but then she thinks she'd be playing God like a time-travelling villain she just defeated. The past is the past and she must accept this and move on.
  • In the third issue of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, Supergirl gains time-travelling powers and goes back in time to stop an asteroid from hitting her hometown.
• Astro City:
  • Samaritan was originally from the 35th century, when mankind was nearly extinct. In a desperate attempt, he was sent back in time to stop the event that triggered his Bad Future. He arrived in 1985, accidentally infused with the primal energy of time and space, and barely managed to avert the Challenger shuttle explosion. He had saved the future and became a superhero, but at the cost of eliminating his original timeline and everyone in it.
  • This is a background event in "The Nearness of You". A time-manipulating supervillain ends up shattering time itself and endangering all of reality as a result. The heroes eventually managed to restore the timestream, but with some minor differences...
• Cable has apparently set as his ultimate goal to set right everything that went wrong, like preventing Apocalypse from waking up. (He then wakes up Apocalypse himself by accident. Good job.)
• Archie's Sonic The Hedgehog series:
  • Silver's personal Story Arc is much the same as in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) — he comes from a Bad Future where the world is all but destroyed, and is constantly traveling through time trying to find a way to undo it, with his only clue being that the betrayal of a member of the Freedom Fighters was somehow key to this disaster. Of course, like his game counterpart he's being advised by a (supposedly reformed) villain, but it wasn't until he decided to talk to the more informed denizens of the present that he figured out who his target was: Sally Acorn, who had been captured and roboticized by Dr. Eggman and forced to fight her friends against her will. Silver did manage to subdue his target, but then the book went into its crossover with Megaman and the whole thing became an Aborted Arc when the series resumed after the crossover thanks to a Continuity Reboot.
  • A Story Arc in the early 100's issues involved Knuckles' future daughter Lara-Su attempting to undo her own Bad Future by preventing her father's assassination. Unfortunately, when she got back to her time, she discovered that her mother had lied to her in order to protect her — the truth was, Knuckles hadn't died, he'd pulled a Face–Heel Turn and was in fact responsible for the Bad Future they lived in. The bright side, however, is that the "present" Lara-Su had visited was the series' main timeline, while her future is an alternate one. So we don't have to worry about our Knuckles switching sides like that.
  • The two story arcs intersected, with Silver helping Lara-Su defeat her crazed father. Silver wished Lara good luck as he left to continue his mission.
• In the Star Trek "Time Crime" miniseries, someone screwed up the timeline so that Klingons aren't aggressive warmongers and the Romulan Empire doesn't exist. Despite the positive bits, Kirk and Spock still have to fix everything because the overall outcome would ultimately be a Bad Future. That and, as bad as Romulans are, they don't deserve to be erased from time. In one Tearjerker moment, Kirk realizes that "fixing" the timeline will mean losing his son David (in the real timeline David was killed by Klingons), and he gives his son one final hug before embarking on his trip through time.
• A recurring plot in Paperinik New Adventures.
  • The first time is when the Raider arrives in present-day Duckburg to prevent an experiment with nuclear fusion from blowing up half of the city, and PK (Donald Duck's superhero alter ego) has to help him fix thing and prevent the Time Police from stopping him while preventing the Raider from using the fixed experiment from charging his dimensional travel device and raid all dimensions (he ends up discovering a flaw in the device that froze the Raider in all timelines at once until the Time Police arrested him and slowing the Time Police long enough for them to settle on ruining the experiment in a non-catastrophic way).
  • The second time it's discovered that an experiment in the future created a bubble that would destroy all the time, and The Organization gets Paperinik to free the Raider before sending them to stop the experiment.
    • It's implied that the mess had been caused by The Organization sending an agent to prevent the experiment and the danger in first place, resulting in the experiment being anticipated and the agent causing the experiment to go awry in the attempt to stop it. Being Genre Savvy, one of the leaders of The Organization conceived the plan seen in the story, that ultimately resulted in Paperinik and the Raider getting the experiment anticipated a little more and cause it to go awry again, but arriving before the forming bubble in time to stop it.
• In the Runaways arc "Dead-End Kids", the kids are ostensibly hired by the Kingpin to steal a device. When the Kingpin tries to collect the device from them, they flee, and in the ensuing flight, they activate the device, which ends up sending them back in time to 1907, where they meet a similar group of runaways, one of whom, Lillie Mc Gurty, hits it off with Victor. It later turns out that the much-older Lillie Mc Gurty of 2007 was the person who hired them, through the Kingpin, to steal the device and then orchestrated the events that caused them to use it, because Victor was the love of her life and she thought if she could get him to travel back in time again, they'd spend the rest of their lives together. Unfortunately for her, her actions also resulted in a gang war that forced the Runaways to retreat back to their own time, and Lillie's younger self was to go with them.
• In the Grand Finale for Spider-Girl, Spider-Girl:The End, May's symbiote-created clone April does this when it turns out that May dying leads to an apocalyptic future where Carnage symbiotes ravage the world.
• The Uncanny X-Men storyline "The Last Will And Testament of Charles Xavier" turns into this. As one of Xavier's last wishes, he wants the X-Men to find and help train an Omega-level mutant he couldn't (mostly because he was way too powerful). Cyclops hunts him and down and attempts to help him alongside Illyana (who is borrowing a past version of Doctor Strange's Eye of Aggamotto) and Emma Frost, only for them to get killed when S.H.I.E.L.D.. One of Cyclops' students decides to travel back in time and persuades a past version of Xavier to prevent this, who does so by preventing the mutants parents from meeting, thus negating his birth. This also has the effect of removing the original beneficiary of who'd get the Xavier School from Mystique to Cyclops.
• In Convergence #8, With the death of Deimos at the hands of Parallax, all the temporal energies of the time travellers that Deimos had absorbed were loose, and threatened to make the planet Telos into "the bullet that will destroy the multiverse". To fix this, survive and hopefully return to what he used to be, and to undo the destruction of the Convergence worlds, Brainiac tries to give the loosed temporal energies back to the survivors to restore their worlds. However, the Crisis on Infinite Earths event prevents him, so he has to send Barry Allen and the pre-Crisis Kara Zor-El back to their deaths... then Parallax decides he wants to go, that he wants redemption and be a hero and Post-Crisis Superman, Lois Lane and their son join him. The end result? Crisis on Infinite Earths is undone and the multiverse is restored in full.
• Anderson: Psi-Division: When Anderson finds herself in a young woman's body on Deadworld before its destruction, she tries to prevent the rise of the Dark Judges by stopping Judge Death's transformation into an undead monster. She fails completely after Death is tipped off by a mole within the resistance.
• One storyline in The Power of SHAZAM! had Silvana alter history, leading to Billy Batson's parents becoming Captain Marvel. However, when it's revealed that the alterations to this will hit throughout time, Billy's father opts to set things right by stopping Silvana from making the changes. However, Waverider decides to step in to make one teeny-tiny alteration — he's able to set things up so that Billy's terrible childhood is undone and he stays with his sister Mary.
• Robin: Tim Drake received a message from an apparent Bad Future warning him that one of the members of the Batfamily had turned into a Knight Templar tasking him with preventing the change from coming to pass. The whole thing turned out to be a test orchestrated by Batman, who wanted Tim to be prepared for such an eventuality. Tim was not amused, especially as he'd already had to deal with the lunatic knight templar replacment Bruce picked after Bane broke his back and temporarily quit being Robin.
• Teen Titans: Mirage originally arrived in the "current" timeline on a mission to kill Donna Troy to prevent the birth of a son who will become a horrific despot that Donna isn't even pregnant with yet.
• In Femforce, Stormy Tempest is a Space Police officer who is sent back in time to the 21st century to prevent the corruption that is taking over planets in her time from ever beginning.
• This is what causes the Flashpoint event: Barry Allen, wanting to fix the damage to his past that Professor Zoom/Reverse Flash caused, went back in time to save his mom, causing a Set Wrong What Once Went Right and creating the Flashpoint timeline. Once Zoom tells Barry what he did, he's able to go back in time to stop himself from pulling it off.
  • Later on, this is how Barry defeats Zoom as well; he chooses to Save the Villain and use the Speed Force to erase Zoom's Temporal Paradox powers, grounding him in reality and making it so that he never became a villain in the first place, allowing him to live a peaceful, happy life (far, far away from Barry).
• What Superboy Prime wanted to do during Infinite Crisis by bringing back his earth and his other attempts to get back Earth-Prime. Ironically, he ended up succeeding with Infinite Crisis as Earth-Prime ended up reborn. Unfortunately, everyone there knows what he did via comic books tuned into the multiverse and his parents and girlfriend end up being terrified of him.