Ret-Gone/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Ret-Gone in Live-Action TV include:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

  • On Angel, Angel has memories of his son Connor removed from all of his friends minds, so that only he remembers Connor ever existed. The difference here is that Connor still exists, just not in the minds of the supporting cast. Their modified memories of what happened the previous seasons are never fully explained, even after certain characters get their memories back.
  • Inverted on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dawn popped into existence, leaving the viewers scratching their heads for a while since all the characters acted as if Dawn had always been with them. It turns out that Dawn is fabricated and all the characters have false memories. Just what their memories of the first four seasons were changed to is never specified, but they all remember Dawn being there alongside them the entire time.
    • A number of the official comics set during the first four seasons have Dawn as a character, with notes attached saying, in effect, "Yeah, she didn't exist back then, but everyone remembers her being there, so..."

Doctor Who

  • In The Sarah Jane Adventures, Sarah Jane gets eradicated, with Maria the only person with any memory of her. And later, Maria gets eradicated, with only her father remembering her. It nearly goes one step further.
  • The Torchwood episode "Adam" both inverts this (Adam inserts himself into the memories of the other team members to be able to exist) and plays it straight as a means to get rid of him Jack gives everyone a memory pill and erases the record of Adam from their database
  • The cracks in time throughout series 5 of the revived Doctor Who can do this, starting in "Flesh and Stone". Time travelers can still remember the victims - unless they were part of the traveller's own history, as we learn in "Cold Blood" when Rory is erased. It Gets Worse in "The Pandorica Opens", where the TARDIS blows up, triggering the explosion that caused/will cause/is causing the cracks and threatening to Ret-Gone the universe. In "The Big Bang, both Rory and the universe get better.
    • And Stephen Moffat has reportedly said that, as a result of what was necessary to fix this crisis, a number of major events of the preceding seasons (most notably, the several alien invasions and other incidents that attracted widespread public notice) have been erased from history, leaving an Earth that is once again (almost) entirely ignorant of the existence of alien beings. What this means for the past Companions whose travels with the Doctor hinged on those events is anybody's guess.
    • In the original series episode "Invasion of the Dinosaurs", the Well-Intentioned Extremists would have Ret-Goned everyone outside the protection field. This would have included nearly all Humanity, as well as the entire Silurian species.
    • In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama Neverland, the Time Lords are revealed to have a device called "The Oubliette of Eternity", which is a dispersal chamber combined with an erase-from-history device. The really horrifying thing that is that until they look at the Ripple Effect Proof records, even a person who has authorized its use many times over is under the impression that it has never been used.
    • During the Sontaran invasion of Gallifrey, the De-Mat Gun worked like this. Expanded Universe implies the Eighth Doctor used a massively magnified version of the Gun to create the Time Lock to imprison everyone in the Last Great Time War.

Star Trek

  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • In the episode Remember Me, this happened to the entire crew of the Enterprise; only Dr. Crusher remembered the missing people. This leads to a rather odd scene in which only Picard and Crusher were left on the ship, and he insisted that it made sense that they could run the ship with only two people - then the computer insists after Picard vanishes that she has always run the entire Enterprise alone. Only after everyone was gone did Dr Crusher figure out that she was trapped in a pocket universe based on her own thoughts. And it's shrinking.
    • And, of course, this is also Q's main threat to Picard in the first (and last) episode: To wipe humanity itself out so completely that it will never have existed.
    • Yesterday's Enterprise, Tasha Yar finds out she shouldn't exist because she died in the "real" timeline. The episode causes a Time Paradox when Yar "sacrifices" her life to restore the timeline - but later it's learned she was taken prisoner and gave birth to Sela.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "Children of Time" (the crew find out they started a colony 200 years in the past and to prevent the non-existence of several thousand people they agree to go back and strand themselves. However, Odo, having lived those 200 years and was distressed that Kira was going to die in this timeline from some severe injury. So he fixed the Defiant and causes the non-existence of those thousands of people.
  • In the Voyager two-parter "Year of Hell", the episode's villain, Annorax, has a weapon ship that can erase entire civilizations from history. The plot is resolved when Janeway's kamikaze attack on the weapon ship causes the weapon ship itself to be erased from history, ironically bringing about the very goal that Annorax had been trying to accomplish: the restoration of his wife, whom he had carelessly erased in the episode's backstory.
    • The irony being that the original firing of the weapon caused the villain's Necromantic quest: by completely annihilating his people's enemies, they lost a vital immunity they had gained due to contact with them, causing huge numbers of deaths by disease, and altering the timeline dramatically. Just firing the weapon ONCE caused horrible changes in the timeline and basically removed all of his crew, and a huge amount of their civilization, from existence. How does he decide to fix it? BY FIRING IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
    • He also tries to tell Chakotay that temporal changes must be done carefuly, such as when Chakotay suggests erasing a comet that resulted in the Voyager being redirected to this area. Apparently, this comet is responsible for all life in this part of space via Panspermia. Erasing it would be bad.
    • The fact that Annorax is played by Red Forman doesn't help things. Dumbass.

Stargate

  • An episode of Stargate SG-1 did it again with a community of people living under a shield dome on an otherwise hellish planet: they all had devices on their heads which wired them into a central mainframe to retrieve knowledge from it. However, the shield was losing power, so the computer slowly shrank it over the years, controlling the excess population in their sleep and sending them out to die in the boiling atmosphere outside, and then editing the remaining people's memories so they thought the town had always been that size and didn't remember the dead ones.

Other works

  • The same plot, with a research facility substituted for the ship and virtual reality goggles substituted for a Negative Space Wedgie, appeared in the Eureka episode "Games People Play." Much like the TNG episode,[context?] it comes down to the ludicrous yet creepy statement that the population of Eureka is "two."
  • Alice: What Mel fears has happened to him in the 1983 episode, "Sweet, Erasable Mel" (after Vera accidentally erases his financial records from his new computer). Things temporarily get worse for Mel when he and Alice go to the bank and try to resolve the issue – the banker accidentally presses the "delete" key, not only double-erasing Mel but the banker's information as well! (The banker famously sings, mournfully, "I don't exist!")
  • The Dukes of Hazzard: Coy and Vance, the "replacement Dukes," after John Schneider and Tom Wopat returned to the series in their original roles as Bo and Luke. While the departures of actors Byron Cherry and Christopher Mayer were explained – they were leaving to "tend to a sick relative" – and there was one quick scene with all four Dukes before Coy and Vance left, the "fake Dukes" (as they were sometimes known to fans) are never referred to again, and it is as though they never existed.
  • Twilight Zone: "And When the Sky Was Opened". Three astronauts return from a trip into space and disappear one at a time. As each disappears, only one of the astronauts remembers that the others existed, until he disappears too, then the spacecraft they returned in vanishes as well. Every time someone disappears, the audience sees that day's newspaper, saying something along these lines each time: "Three men return from space", "Two men return from space", "Lone man returns from space", And something about a "miracle birth".
    • One of the episodes of the 2002 Twilight Zone called "Upgrade" was about a woman who wished for a perfect family. She gets her wish, and her children are replaced by more perfect children. However, eventually she is replaced.
  • Nowhere Man has this as the series premise. In the end Veil discovers he really did never exist. He's a brainwashed federal agent.
  • While passing through pockets of "unreality" where things change at random, the Red Dwarf crew of four pass through one and then start wondering what happened. They're in an unreality pocket but nothing has changed, the ship is normal and all three of them are normal. Meanwhile the Cat is sitting in the front seat, invisible and inaudible, constantly trying to correct them. Luckily for him this doesn't last long; once they exit the pocket he becomes "real" again and the others forget that they ever forgot him.

Kryten: I don't understand. The three of us are here as normal.
Cat: The four of us! The four of us! Can't you see me? Can't you feel me?
He shakes Lister's shoulder.
Lister: Look out, we're getting some buffeting!

    • The Inquisitor from the eponymous episode does this to people he deems unworthy. He mostly completes this with Lister and Kryten but is stopped by a Stable Time Loop. According to Lister, he programs the Inquisitor's gauntlet to backfire and do this to the Inquisitor himself.
  • At the start of the second series of Primeval, Claudia Brown has never existed, though this was foreshadowed. There were other differences, such as that they had a new base, and the identical Jenny Lewis existed.
  • This is a standard side effect of entering Neverwhere.
  • In The Lost Room, this happens to room 10 of the Sunshine motel, as well as everything in it, in the same event that gave all of the objects inside it extraordinary powers. After the event, the room was never built and the motel owners don't remember it ever existing. It can only be accessed by using one of the objects, the key to it, to open a door (any door). One of the objects is a man who was occupying the room at the time of the event. Afterwards, he came home to find that his wife no longer remembered him.
  • The 4400 once did this to its title characters (all 4400 of them). In one episode, appeared to do it (again) to all but one of them, but it turned out that it was really a dream world created by said character.
  • In one episode of Quantum Leap, Sam's actions accidentally cause Al to be convicted of murder and executed in the 1960s. Al is immediately replaced by another character (played by Roddy MacDowell) who in the new time line has always been Sam's connection to the Project. When Sam fixes things, Al comes back, with no idea that he had ever stopped being there.
  • In Heroes five years in the future some of the characters had settled down (or undergone a Heel Face Turn) and had families of cute little children, that won't exist now because the future has changed and the mothers of said children have been Stuffed in The Fridge.
    • There's also Caitlin. Peter utterly ruins her life just by crossing paths with her and for all her trouble she gets left behind in a Bad Future that's subsequently erased from existence, again thanks to Peter.
  • In one episode of Smallville, Clark casually says life would be so much easier to everyone if he had never existed. Only he's holding the octagonal key, which then goes on to Retcon the world without him. At first everybody is indeed happier, until he finds out that President Luthor is about to destroy the world. Luckily, as Brainiac kills him with a kryptonite bullet, he says farewell with Jor-El's voice, and then it all fades away. It was an illusion created by the disc, to move Clark into saving himself in the past.
  • In one skit on Chappelle's Show, Dave Chappelle took a woman on a Magical Negro ride into a world where her sizable breasts she'd been complaining about were Ret-Goned. It wasn't such A Wonderful Life for her.
  • In one episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, this very nearly happens to the entire holiday of Christmas. According to Salem, it has already happened to another holiday, called Bobunk.

Salem: Ah, the days of Bobunk...

  • In the season 3 finale of Fringe, this happens to Peter Bishop. He eventually gets better. The trope is apparently played to full effect regarding Peter's infant son Henry, though.
    • Although Henry will have an equivalent in the new timeline, Henrietta, if the future, Observer-controlled world episode is anything to go by.
  • In an homage to It's a Wonderful Life in Dallas a demon shows JR Ewing what everyone's life would be like had he not existed. After seeing how well off everyone would be it convinces JR to shoot himself which concludes the series.
  • In Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, the Greatest Treasure in the Universe has the power to do this to Zangyack, which would retroactively undo all the damage they've done to the universe. However, using it would also erase the history and legacy of the Super Sentai, so the Gokaiger ultimately decide not to use it.
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