Meanwhile in the Future: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|'''''Sarah:''' Arlington? Arlington? Where've you gone? Oh god, I'm stuck here in the late Jurassic without a time machine.''

 

An unusual form of [[Meanwhile Back At The]]. The story cuts back and forth between two plotlines, just as in [[Meanwhile Back At The]], but here the plotlines are separated in time as well as space; one of them is chronologically in advance of the other. The narrator treats the two different plot threads in different times as if they were happening simultaneously, despite the fact that, chronologically, the plot thread in the past is going to be resolved long before the thread in the future starts.

[[Time Travel]] is not a neccessary element for this trope, but in those scenarios it can also reflect the ability of past, present, and future to interact with one another.

 

 

Related to [[Time Travel Tense Trouble]].

 

Note: Please don't duplicate entries between this trope, [[San Dimas Time]], and [[Portal to the Past]].

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Drifting Classroom]]'', main character Sho and his entire elementary school have been sent to a [[After the End|post-apocalyptic]] [[Mordor|wasteland]]. Several times in the story, Sho's mother, still in the past, has received a psychic message from her son cryptically asking her to plant a [[Deus Ex Machina]] to rescue him from a cliffhanger that he's encountered in the future. She usually has to go through a short storyline to put everything in place, while the audience is waiting for Sho to escape the cliffhanger he's in.

 

* The Swedish comic ''Goliat'' would announce cuts with captions like "Simultaneously in the Stone Age ..." in its time-travel arcs, without apparent irony.

* This happens at the beginning of a storyline in ''[[Ultimate Fantastic Four]]'' (before they go back to prevent Ben's transformation to the Thing.) Reed is in contact with Sue and Johnny who are both in different time periods. Their communicators are apparently acting as a [[Portal to the Past]] for communication.

* Used as a plot device in a 1969 ''Action Comics'' story where the President asks Superman not to fly into the past or future for the next 24 hours to avoid disrupting a military experiment. No sooner has he agreed this than Superman receives an urgent distress call from the year 101,970. Instead of simply waiting until the next day before setting off, Superman uses a defective time-bubble belonging to the Legion. It takes him to his destination, but the defect causes him to age every year along the way, leaving him trapped in the future and over a hundred thousand years old. (He got better.) The point was raised in the letter column, with the editor eagerly accepting the reader's suggestion that Superman hadn't been thinking straight due to the effects of Red Kryptonite.

* In the ''[[Strontium Dog]]'' "Max Bubba" storyline, Johnny goes back to the year 793 AD to stop the eponymous mutant from changing history. Bubba proceeds to kill every member of the Thoresen family, apparently to send a message to the future, with the result that descendants of the Thoresons spontaneously drop dead and vanish, yet everybody seems to remember them. Characters in the future continue to monitor temporal distortions, and infer from the various disasters which occur that Bubba is continuing to wreak havoc with history, and Johnny has failed.

* Somewhat lampshaded in ''[[DC One Million]].'' Half of the [[Justice League]] travels to the year 85,271 to be honored and feted. The ones in the present figure out that it's a trap, and start panicking to figure out a way to rescue their teammates before they're killed. The Huntress is the voice of reason when she points out that they have ''eighty thousand years'' to plan a rescue.

* A good third of the plotlines in ''[[Watchmen (comics)|Watchmen]]'' takes place in the past, focusing on the Minutemen and Crimebusters.

 

* In ''[[Light and Dark - The Adventures of Dark Yagami]]'' the phrase "Meanwhile in the past" is used

 

* ''Best Defense'' uses the [[Flash Forward]] form of this: the main story involved Dudley Moore on a development project for a new tank, with the secondary story following along with Eddie Murphy as a tank commander going through a comedy of errors largely due to flaws in the tank. The future story reflects the events in the past story as they go along, highlighting the design decisions (and corporate espionage) as they take place.

** At the climax of the film, Eddie Murphy's tank is overheating, leaving him a sitting duck on the battlefield, but Dudley Moore leaps to his rescue with a cooling device ... ten years earlier.

* In ''The Lake House'', two people living two years apart in the same house exchange letters through time. Near the end of the film, the woman (who's the one who lives in the future) realises that the bloke she's been writing letters to is the one that died in her arms near the beginning of the film. Thus she frantically races to inform him of what happened before he gets run over.

* ''[[Meet the Robinsons]]'' briefly does this when Louis is in the future while Bowler Hat Guy is still in the present.

 

* Alan Garner's novel, ''Thursbitch'', uses this trope with some crossover between times in a small hamlet in England.

* The [[Michael Crichton]] novel ''Timeline'' justifies the time trip's thirty-six hour limit with the explanation that they weren't actually travelling into the past, they were travelling into a kind of parallel universe which existed in an earlier time, ''but in which time passed at the same rate as in our world''. The time machines only have enough battery life to maintain a connection for thirty-six hours before they needed to be recalled. Or something.

* ''A Tale of Time City'' by Diana Wynne Jones, uses this constantly. Characters talk about, for example, World War II "becoming" longer (i.e. it starts earlier and finishes later), something that is apparently a gradual process, although "gradual" in what is hard to say. Partially justified by the idea that the eponymous ''Time City'' exists in its own personal timeframe outside the rest of time, but nonetheless, the time travelling doesn't make internal sense. Still a good book, though.

* This is a recurring gimmick in the ''Nicolas Eymerich, Inquisitor'' series by Valerio Evangelisti: While the main action is taking place in the middle ages, each episode also depicts a related subplot taking place "simultaneously" centuries earlier or later. And it doesn't even technically involve time travel, making the narrative device all the more contrived.

* ''[[Illuminatus]]'' is chock full of this, explicitly described as such to be paradoxic and funny.

* As it is a book about Vlad Tepes and Elizabeth Bathory, who can somehow write letters to each other despite living over one hundred years apart, ''[[Count and Countess]]'' is quite full of this.

* ''[[Cryptonomicon]]'' simultaneously juggles the story of World War II soldiers Bobby Shaftoe and Goto Dengo, World War II cryptographer Lawrence Waterhouse, and modern-day computer hacker Randy Waterhouse.

* ''[[Seekers of the Sky]]'' has the recurring plotline of the Redeemer ([[Alternate History|replacement]] [[Jesus]]), which is repeatedly alluded to in the present-day narration but revealed only in small heaps across two books.

* [[Dean Koontz]] does this in his time travel book ''Lightening'', as his hero has to bounce between the time lab in 1944, {{spoiler|where he drops a few hints to Churchill about winning the war}} and helping his girlfriend in 1989 avoid time-traveling Gestopo men, so she doesn't get killed ''again''. It... gets complicated.

 

* ''[[Torchwood]]'' - The episode "Captain Jack Harkness", set in 1941/2008.

** Also played straight in the first episode of series two, "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" with the conversation between Captains Jack and John, concerning the stat of the Time Agency, an agency which won't exist for several thousand years.

* Justified in ''[[Starstuff]],'' since time passes at the same rate on both sides of the communication link.

 

* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' audio play ''The Kingmaker'', The Fifth Doctor and his companions, Peri and Erimem, are stranded in two separate time zones. The story jumps between the two zones, telling the 'before' and 'after' of a sinister plot.

* In ''[[The Goon Show]]'' episode "The Treasure in the Tower", the plot switches between a pirate ship trying to bury its treasure in 1600 , and an attempt by the Ministry of Works in 1957 trying to find the treasure. At the end of the episode the pirates end up burying their treasure in 1600 in the hole dug in 1957 to find the treasure.

 

* [[Real Time Strategy]] game ''[[Achron]]'' lives and breathes this trope. With the ability to jump back and forth through time to create changes you have to react to an opponent who may not be in the same time period as you.

* The adventure game ''[[Day of the Tentacle]]'' jumped between three time periods at the same house; the modern day, 200 years in the past and 200 years in the future. Doing certain things in earlier periods would change the future periods.

* Similarly, the second ''[[Back to The Future]]'' game for the NES let you jump between 1955, 1985, and 2015; doing things in an early period would alter later ones.

** Carried out even further with the obscure ''[[Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure]]'' game for the [[Atari Lynx]]. The player could travel to nearly a dozen different time eras, and many puzzles would require setting something up in the past to resolve an obstacle in the future.

** That tower actually has [[Year Inside, Hour Outside|time stopped]] around it, as the workers are instructed to keep building until [[Loophole Abuse|the sun goes down]].

** Meanwhile, the events of ''Ocarina Of Time'' actually created three divergent timelines, which later games were set in.

** Everything probably justified due to the fact the reason they were separated in the first place is that Kain broke the [[Stable Time Loop]], so time went a little crazy.

* ''[[City of Heroes]]'' has screens that give a real-time overview of the situation in Recluse's Victory, a [[Player Versus Player|PvP]] battleground set in... the future.

* [[Sonic the Hedgehog|Sonic CD]] made use of it as well. It even gave a 'Good Future' bonus when you beat Robotnik/Eggman.

* In ''[[Prince of Persia|Prince of Persia: Warrior Within]]'', the Prince uses time portals dotted around the castle on the Island of Time to get past broken down areas, activate devices that create paths for him in his own time and generally messes with the timeline to survive.

** Of course, messing with the timeline is what got him in that situation to begin with.

** This trope is expressly referenced early in the game. Shahdee says that Prince have reached the island, despite that she's in the Past, several hundred years before the fact.

* ''[[Freedom Force]]'' has an almost literal version of this in the second game, where the heroes have to go into the past to set a timed explosive on the shield generator for the ''[[Big Bad]]'''s fortress so they can get into it in the future. On the way in, they're recognized by one of his henchmen, who immediately demands that the guards raise their security from now on. [[Lampshade Hanging|"Meanwhile, in the future..."]] the guards standing outside the fortress disappear and [[Elite Mook|more powerful versions]] appear in their place while the characters are watching.

* ''[[Dark Cloud|Dark Chronicle]]'' does this handily, courtesy of the protagonists' personal [[Applied Phlebotinum]] activating a [[Portal to the Past]] (or in this case, 100 years in the future, and back again). Because [[Big Bad|Griffon]] has incredible powers over time {{spoiler|and exists 10,000 years in the past}}, the two periods are treated as separate fronts in the war. [[Makes Sense in Context|It actually works.]]

* The last case of ''Apollo Justice: [[Ace Attorney]]'' takes place both in the game's present and seven years ago. On at least one occasion, you must find evidence in the present so you can [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Present]] it seven years ago.

 

* Seen in the ''[[Narbonic]]'' storyline "Dave Davenport Has Come Unstuck In Time". Probably justified; Dave's consciousness is bouncing around between three of his past and future selves without his conscious control, so the events are ordered as he experiences them.

** And the temporal-paradox theme [[Crossover]] uses "[http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2163.html Meanwhile, 2 years into the future of a story that occurs 70 years earlier]".

** [http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2177.html This comic] includes a [[Lampshade Hanging]] of sorts, and the annotation contains, yes, a link to this very page. And this example was added... ''clicks stopwatch'' ten minutes after it was posted.

** Combined with aggressively [[Temporal Mutability|Branching Timelines]]; the very fact that the time travellers have travelled back in time means that that future will never happen, but ''does'' impact the present, so it's slightly easier to think of it as the past.

* The author of ''[[Casey and Andy]]'' carefully justified it in [http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=659 this strip]. Note also [[The Rant]] below.

{{quote|'''Casey''': [[Lampshade Hanging|This just keeps not making sense!]]}}

* Avoided in ''[http://www.tru-lifeadventures.com TRU-Life Adventures]. Old Bob's multiple appearances in the present have not been shown in his own personal chronological order.

* [http://www.byrobot.net/?cid=043.jpg Used and discussed in this Byrobot "Sally and Thumb: Urchins in Goner-Town" strip.]

* A running gag of sorts in [[MS Paint Adventures]]' latest series, ''[[Homestuck]]''.

** Also, the [[Bad Future|"Accelerate"]] update.

** "Jane: Enter" reveals {{spoiler|two characters were in the future all along.}}

 

 

* ''[[Kids Next Door]]'', "Op FUTURE".

* ''[[Futurama]]'':

* [[Justice League]]'s Vandal Savage must have his own [[Timey-Wimey Ball|field of time]] around him, as this happens repeatedly and inconsistently. Noticeable at the end of the episode ''Hereafter''.

** This might be justified in his case. (Or [[Magic A Is Magic A|as justified as any]] [[Time Travel]] trope is, at least...) At various times it has been a rule in the DC universe, and the [[Diniverse]] might use this as well, that the same person can't travel through time to a period in which another version of that person exists. If they do, the time-traveling version is [[Intangible Time Travel|intangible]] and invisible. But Vandal Savage is immortal and exists for ''all'' of humanity's history and future. This makes direct time travel impossible for him (although there are ways to do whatever he wants indirectly), so [[Mental Time Travel]] is the only option, and a phenomenon he's prepared for and used to, and no doubt there are other tricks that could be used. This rule is explicitly stated by Savage in "Hereafter", but is ignored in other parts of the DCAU, including two episodes of ''[[Static Shock]]'' and the [[Justice League Unlimited]] two-parter "The Once and Future Thing".

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]

[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]