EVERYONE is confused. That's the temporal prime directive!
Both San Dimas Time and this trope involve story threads in different time periods being told simultaneously. Some of the differences as far as I can tell. - San Dimas Time often implies illogical/confusing/nobody-thought-it-through temporal rules, but that's more of a subjective reaction than an actual trope. - San Dimas Time seems to imply more awareness and taking action with the temporal connection in mind on the part of the characters, whereas this trope is more about the presentation to the audience. - San Dimas Time could probably be used as a catch-all for any sort of synchronized connection, whether it's implied, imagined, or operational, between two parts of a timeline, whereas this trope is more specifically and clearly about the presentation of the story. Not sure how many examples violate this theory though...
Cutting the following:
- River Song loves this trope, it having appeared in both her stories to date. [...] In the second, she leaves a message for him in a ship's black box which she is certain will sooner or later end up in a museum... where the Doctor will sooner or later see it, since he loves to go to museums to "keep score". The whole scene is played out using this trope in both cases.
- Arguably the best use of this one is during the beginning of "The Pandorica Opens", where it's revealed that River made the first example of writing in the history of the universe on the side of an enormous cliff, just to get his attention.
- River Song loves this trope, it having appeared in both her stories to date. [...] In the second, she leaves a message for him in a ship's black box which she is certain will sooner or later end up in a museum... where the Doctor will sooner or later see it, since he loves to go to museums to "keep score". The whole scene is played out using this trope in both cases.
These are actually examples of Write Back to the Future: she sends the message with the exact time to reach her, knowing that he'll find it eventually and go to said exact time. Emphasis on eventually: neither are no situations where actions in the past "instantly" affect the future or vice versa.
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The definition of this trope was extremely confusing and mixed up with San Dimas Time—I had to go to the archived comments to figure out the difference between the two.
Rewrote the definition and stripped out all the blather about how unrealistic this is when done badly. Since this trope is entirely about a narrative technique (juxtaposing events in past and future timelines), it has nothing to do with realism; any story could be told using Meanwhile, in the Future…. Complaints about believability belong in San Dimas Time, not here.
This and San Dimas Time are responsible for people saying things like "He's in the past right now" or "I wonder how he's doing 40 years in the past". Any way to incorporate that?
It seems that much of the definition hinges on the lack of direct communication between the two time frames, particularly that the events of the past *don't* change the future, per se, but that the audience witnesses the repercussions of past events more rapidly than real-time would allow. But then several examples (like "Frequency" and "Lake House" in the film section) involve explicit communication between the time frames *and* an attempt to change the timeline.
So who is confused this trope: me, or the tropers who added those "change the future" examples?
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