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{{trope}}
{{quote|"[[Trope Namer|The clock in San Dimas]] is always running."
|'''Rufus''', ''[[Bill and Ted (film)|Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure]]''}}
As a result, events in two different time periods are shown to happen concurrently, so that people two years in the past only have X minutes to stop the villain from committing some terrible act in the present, even though they should technically have X minutes ''plus two years'' to sort it all out. Or perhaps the heroes have [[Delayed Ripple Effect|only Y minutes]] to get to their time machine and prevent the villain from doing something thirty years ago, which obviously makes no sense either.<ref>Debatable: Once the ripples catch up to the heroes, they might find themselves without a time machine. Fix it ''now'' or never fix it at all.</ref> (Whatever "our" next year may bring, there is little risk of its world suddenly having experienced a [[Godwin's Law of Time Travel|Nazi victory in 1945]].)
Alternately, characters traveling to some other time can't come back to the moment they left, but are somehow bound to return to a time, for example, eight minutes after they left if they were gone eight minutes. Can be justified, however, if time travel is of the "travel ''exactly'' X time forward/backward" variety. Or perhaps the characters just need to avoid [[Temporal Paradox|paradoxes]], but it's okay to [[Tricked-Out Time|Trick Out Time]].
Note that this is different from the [[Portal to
If you want to be charitable, you can blame this on the [[Timey-Wimey Ball]].
If the characters are in the past relative to the key events, they might avert this by taking [[The Slow Path]]. If they are in the future, they may ''[[Wrong Genre Savvy|think]]'' they can tell whether or not they [[Time Travel Tense Trouble|are going to have succeeded]] (by simply reading a newspaper or otherwise) — but perhaps somebody [[Tricked-Out Time]], or maybe there's going to be a [[Delayed Ripple Effect]] "after" the villain changed the past.
Note: Please don't duplicate entries between this trope, [[Meanwhile in
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Time Paladin Sakura]]'' seems to run on this: Sakura hears on the past her base is being attacked, and comes back to find it wrecked.
== Comic Books ==
* Early [[Silver Age]] ''[[Legion of Super-Heroes]]'' stories are full of such moments, with characters crossing back and forth between the 20th and 30th centuries as if they were just on the other side of town. "Oh no! We're too late!"
** Subverted in a 1990s ''Superboy'' story, when the Legion lose a member in the timestream. The Legionnaires insist they need to find her now, before something happens to her, to which Brainiac 5 replies, "Doesn't anyone realize we're talking about time travel?"
** In the Legion's tie-in story to ''[[Final Crisis]]'', {{spoiler|Superboy burns a line across Superboy-Prime's chest, and the same mark appears on the chest of Prime's future counterpart, Time Trapper.}}
* The DCU's ''[[Crisis
* ''[[Donald Duck]]'' time travel generally uses this rule, at least in the sense of characters returning X hours later. One especially
** Also by Disney, the stories where [[Mickey Mouse]] and [[Goofy]] (and sometimes other people) travel on Prof. Zapotec's time machine. [http://coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=I+TL+2458-5 Example]: the duo complains about being called to see the Aztec's proto-soccer right before the finals of a championship, travel, and arrive hours later, where Zapotec has recorded the game and such.
** Of course, they had a good way to justify this: The machine didn't travel with them, it just sent them to a specific time and location, and in order to avoid confusion they set it to lock on to the same spot after a certain amount of time had passed in both streams. That way, if Mickey and Goofy didn't reappear when Zapotec activated the recall function, he knew that he could try again once the same amount of time had passed. And they knew they had to be there at the exact time he would set the machine to.
== Fan
* In ''[[Sailor Moon Zodiac]]'' "episodes" 10 and 11, a botched attempt to have the modern Inner senshi quintet observe their past selves leads not only to this but also to a switch between past and present selves that marks the point where the "series" takes a [[Hotter and Sexier]] turn.
* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' usage of San Dimas Time (see below) is intentionally averted and discussed in ''Forever Janette'' by [[
== Films ==
* In ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (
* In ''[[Bill and
▲* In ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Film)|Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]] III'', the Time Traveling scepter (in the present) only has enough power to work 5 times in 60 hours, after which it is destroyed, rendering even the fully intact scepter in 1603 Japan useless as well.
▲* In ''[[Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure]]'', Rufus tells the titular twosome that while they can go back in time to research their history project, time will advance normally in their hometown of San Dimas. This is later [[Timey-Wimey Ball|contradicted]] in the sequel when they use the time machine to dramatically increase their musical abilities through long practice while only a few moments pass for everyone else. Even the first movie shows the pair coming back to a few seconds before they initially left so that they could have a conversation with themselves, proving that doubles can exist and raising even more questions.
* Subverted in ''[[Back to The Future]]'', when Marty realizes he has all the time in the world to save Doc and sets his return trip to several minutes before he left. Over the course of the trilogy, "we can't go back and try again" is due to either a) problems with the time machine, b) risk of messing up one's own past and causing [[Temporal Paradox|paradoxes]], or c) trying again is out of the question when you're already dead. The drama of a time limit is instead provided by the [[Race Against the Clock|Clock Tower Finale]].
** That's really more of an aversion, as his original plan was to go back to when he left. He never considered going back to several days after.
** Played straight with Marty's fate should he fail to get his parents together. Rather than being instantly wiped from existence, he slowly begins to fade, suggesting some sort of time limit running concurrently with the past. The photograph he has of his siblings slowly vanishing seems to work this way as well; his brother and sister are older than him, so they begin to fade first.
* The edited version of ''[[Highlander|Highlander II:
* Played painfully straight in the first sequel to ''[[Halloweentown (
* In a notable scene from ''[[Frequency]]'', the bad guy gets his hand blown off with a shotgun, meanwhile his 30 years in the future counterpart is shocked to see that same hand wither away into a nub while strangling his original opponent's son.
** Later the father, who originally {{spoiler|died 30 years ago appears out of nowhere to finish off the bad guy}}.
*** In ''[[Frequency]]'', 1969 time and 2000 time seems to be hooked up only when the ham radio is
* In ''[[Best Defense]]'', Dudley Moore races against the clock to install a cooling system in a tank, just in the nick of time to save Eddie Murphy ... ten years later.
** In actuality, while the two scenes are intercut to build up dramatic tension, in the "real" timeline the cooling system was there the whole time... it just wasn't shown to the audience until the critical moment, leaving its existence open to doubt until we're actually ''shown'' Moore managing to get it included in the design. (This forced, fake tension is simply one of the many reasons this movie features prominently in many people's "worst movie ever" lists.)
* In ''[[Austin Powers|Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me]]'' Fat Bastard steals Austin's mojo in 1969 when he was still cryogenically frozen. For an unexplained reason, Austin's mojo seems to drain out of him back in 1999 at the same rate Fat Bastard is stealing it in the past.
* The [[In Name Only]] festival of shame that is the ''[[A Sound of Thunder]]'' film overlaps this with a [[Portal to
* Thoroughly averted at the end of ''[[Stargate SG
== Literature ==
* [[Isaac Asimov]]'s ''The End Of Eternity'', in which an organization is able to travel through our time, while maintaining a wholly separate, normal, only-goes-forward-at-one-second-per-second time of their own. This necessitates the inventions of the words "upwhen" and "downwhen" for the time travelers to be able to talk about the past and the future as it exists in "our" time, instead of their own future and past. They refer to this as "physiotime", as it reflects the aging process, not the passage of time.
* Appears in ''The Prometheus Project'' by Steve White. The heroes are rushing to keep the villains from completing a time machine that will let them change the past, obliterating the present. They're too late, and the villains activate their machine. Fortunately, the heroes have a faster time machine, which they can use to catch the villains before they reach the past, even if they use the time machine later. Somehow, the past doesn't change as soon as the villains leave.
* In the ''[[
* Works for the villains in Harry Turtledove's ''[[The Guns of the South]]'' because the time machine only works in increments of 150 years, meaning that because they got the device in 2014, they could travel back to 1864 and no earlier.
* The time travel in [[
* In ''[[By His Bootstraps]]'' by [[Robert A. Heinlein]], Diktor apparently tried to invoke San Dimas Time on his predecessor self, but was rebuffed by, "How can we waste time when we have ''this''?" So he smoothed it over with fast talk and invocation of authority.
** It makes some sense here, since the protagonist is {{spoiler|essentially every single important character in the story}}. His own personal clock keeps ticking, meaning things need to happen precisely when they did/will/must happen.
* The whole of the ''Pendragon'' series, by D.J. MacHale. Made worse by the fact the Travelers ostensibly arrive exactly when necessary to stop the evil plot, that half of the territories are separated solely by a time difference, and that the villain doesn't have to follow any of the same rules. Massive case of delayed fridge logic.
** Eventually, the Travelers wise up, realizing that [[Big Bad|Saint Daine]] can pretty much undo any repair of a critical point, simply by going back to it.
* In the later books of [[Stephen King]]'s ''[[Dark Tower]]'' series (which involves dimensional as well as time travel), there is revealed to be a Keystone Earth in which time always moves forward and [[Race Against the Clock|the clock is always ticking]]. Time does not move forward at a constant rate, though, periodically "lurching" forward in relation to the universe in which the majority of the action takes place.
** This isn't due to Keystone Earth, though; the "lurching forward" is a direct result of Roland's own world having "[[After the End|moved on]]".
* L. E. Modesitt's ''Timegod'' series has this as an explicit rule: a timediver cannot superimpose himself or herself in space and time. So if one screws something up, he can't just go back a few minutes and try again.
* Whenever the protagonist of [[Octavia Butler]]'s ''Kindred'' is dragged back in time to save Rufus, the time that passes in the present before her return is compressed but proportional to how long she spends in the past. When, for example, she spends a few minutes in the past, she disappears in the present for a mere second or two, but when she accidentally leaves her husband in the past, she spends three weeks in the present before going back and learning that her husband has been stranded for over five years.
* The short story [http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wikihistory "Wikihistory"] by Desmond Warzel would seem to operate on San Dimas time; otherwise there would be no suspense regarding AsianAvenger's return.
* Averted ''hard'' in ''Time Travelers Never Die'' (2009) by Jack McDevitt. The protagonists realize early on that the clock is ''not'' always running in San Dimas, and use that fact to prepare for time trips or to bail themselves out of dicey situations.
* Lynne Reid Banks' ''[[The Indian in
* Much, but not all, of the time travel in Diana Gabaldon's ''[[Outlander (novel)|Outlander]]'' series follows this trope; justified, because the 'default' method of time travel always goes forward or backward by a fixed number of years (and a person's second trip is always in the opposite direction), although there are multiple ways that a traveller can override those defaults.
== Live Action TV ==
* In ''[[Doctor Who]]'', whenever the Doctor meets another Time Lord, no matter how many trips to various eras each has made, they always seem to both remember past events in the same order. Official [[Universe Compendium|universe compendiums]] have confirmed the [[Fanon]] guess that all the TARDISes and everyone traveling in them run on Gallifrey Time, which usually works the same as
▲* In ''[[Doctor Who]]'', whenever the Doctor meets another Time Lord, no matter how many trips to various eras each has made, they always seem to both remember past events in the same order. Official [[Universe Compendium|universe compendiums]] have confirmed the [[Fanon]] guess that all the TARDISes and everyone traveling in them run on Gallifrey Time, which usually works the same as [[San Dimas Time]], barring Timey-Wimey complications.
** Thus, if the Doctor experiences event A followed by event B, the Master must also experience event A followed by event B, though the number of years in between might differ considerably for the two. The same applies to the Doctor meeting earlier regenerations.
** In the ''[[Doctor Who Expanded Universe]]'', the BBC Books novel ''Emotional Chemistry'' maintains a continuous narrative crossing between three time periods, with four separate means of time travel, and only one point at which one of the characters is "out of sync" with the others.
** Subverted in "[[Doctor Who
*** River Song is a strange type of ''[[Inverted Trope|Inversion]]'', in that she apparently routinely experiences events in the opposite order to The Doctor. (Sometimes they experience events in the same order; otherwise their tradition of comparing diaries would be pointless.) She is aware that the first time she meets The Doctor will be the last time he meets her, which (although it is a [[Foregone Conclusion]] for the audience) isn't really necessitated by anything she knows.
*** This same subversion had been done in the previous series, though on a smaller scale. Within their personal timeline, the Doctor and Martha are falling prey to Mr. Saxon's manipulations ''before'' they {{spoiler|travel to the end of the universe, release the Master and accidentally give him the means to go back in time and establish himself as Mr. Saxon on 21st century Earth.}}
*** Mel and the Sixth Doctor "first" met each other in a different order, too.
** In the story "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S11
** In "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S9
** Interestingly, the few occasions when time-travelers do appear to be out of sync with each other there is generally non-Gallifreyan technology involved (Like Captain Jack's [[Time Agent]] wrist band).
** In the revived series, this trope is required to make the Doctor being the [[Last of His Kind]] meaningful. Otherwise, he could run into pre-Timewar Time Lords and Daleks.
*** Well, the entire point of a Time War would seem to be that there is no longer any such thing as a "pre-Timewar Time Lord or Dalek". The participants may remember a time where there was no Time War, but such a time [[Timey-Wimey Ball|no longer exists]]. {{spoiler|[[Doctor Who
**** Except that the time before the time war can be reached if a malfunction similar to what happened in [[Doctor Who
** In one ''[[Doctor Who Expanded Universe]]'' book, the villainess, a Time Lady, monologues (to the readers; she's alone in the room) that she ought to be going up against the (then-current) [[Chessmaster|Seventh Doctor]]. She then decides that he'd be too much for her, looks at all thirteen regenerations, and decides to pick on the Fifth instead, even though that's breaking the rules about meeting out of order. [[Beware the Nice Ones|He's still too much for her.]]
** Note that San Dimas Time is ''justified'' in "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S13
** The Doctor always has this situation when on an inter-temporal phone call for obvious reasons.
** Don't try to make sense of the events of "The Pandorica Opens" and "The Big Bang" without assuming that in the Doctor Who universe, time goes in two directions at once; while the TARDIS can go back and forth in linear time, there's clearly some sort of clock running in a different way, just so {{spoiler|The TARDIS exploding causing every star in the universe to simultaneously supernova at every point in time}} makes sense.
** This is averted in "A Christmas Carol" where the Doctor spends a lot of time in the past but only little time passes in the present.
** The opening of "End of Time" plays this completely straight: The Ood warn that "events that have happened are happening ''now''," and the Doctor runs like the blazes back to the TARDIS in order to travel back to the twenty-first century. He's just a bit too late.
* "Future Tense", an episode of ''[[Star Trek
** Averted in the ''[[Star Trek
* ''[[
** The events of ''[[
*** However, ''Time Force'' muddles the trope due to
* This is somewhat subverted in ''[[Journeyman]]'' considering that Dan doesn't have any control over when he time-travels and the time he is missing from the present is never proportional to how long he was in the past. However, Dan lives in the 2000s and his fellow time-traveler Livia lives in the 1940s. Their lives appear to be synchronized and they experience their encounters, which occur in various time periods, in the same order.
* The 1950s ''[[Flash Gordon (1954
** In one episode the main characters had to travel back to the present day to disarm a bomb set to go off in their time...''1000 friggin' years later''.
** An especially bad example occurred in an episode where, after superluminal travel sent the protagonist back in time, he was still able to communicate with the base ''by radio''.
* A variation occurs in the fifth season of ''[[Lost]]''. The Oceanic 6 leave the Island in 2004, just as the people left on the Island (Sawyer, Juliet, Jin, Miles, Daniel, and Charlotte) start traveling through time, eventually ending up in 1974. When the Oceanic 6 return to the Island in 2007, they are sent back in time to 1977. From everyone's perspective, it has been 3 years since they last met.
** It's even weirder than that. Entering or exiting the island displaces people permanently in time, slightly backward when entering and slightly forward when exiting. (When exiting to Tunisia, far far forward.) But all the time travel that happens as the island
** It's interesting to notice flight 316 got time displaced (
* On ''[[Primeval]]'', each Anomaly seems to operate on its own San Dimas Time. If two prehistoric animals enter an Anomaly two hours apart in their time, they'll emerge two hours apart in ours, in the same order as they entered.
* ''[[Carmen Sandiego|Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego?]]'' imposed a twenty-two minute time limit from the moment that the time-travelling villains stole a historical artifact/landmark to when history would be irreversibly altered. They never twig that they could go back in time to just before the theft in order to stop it, but that would ruin the quiz show a bit.
* In the final episode of ''[[Goodnight Sweetheart]]'' Gary {{spoiler|ends up stuck in the past and writes a message to Ron in the present on the wall of his flat. Rather than the message having been there throughout the intervening decades, it materialises slowly in the present as Gary writes it in 1945.}}
* ''[[Kamen Rider Den-O]]'' uses a variation: the DenLiner (and all other time trains) can only travel between two points in time, the "destination" on the Rider Ticket and the point of origin. The show does have a few episodes where the heroes have to get back to the present in time to prevent another crisis.
* In ''[[Quantum Leap]]'', from the moment Ziggy locates where and when Sam's leaped.
* In ''[[Seven Days]]'', the Backstep Program often had the reverse of "San Dimas Time" issues, as their time machine could only go backward, and only by seven days.
== Tabletop Games ==
* ''[[GURPS]] Time Travel''{{'}}s standard scenario states that you can only travel to time "windows", about three months apart (and slowly growing farther apart), that are dragged forward as normal time passes. Why this happens, along with what happened at the point the windows initially extended from, is an unexplained mystery. It should be noted, however, that this is only one of several options provided by ''GURPS Time Travel'' - it has rules to cover nearly every version of [[Time Travel]] on this site (if not more.)▼
** In an even better example of the trope, the same ''GURPS Time Travel'' setting has relative time rates for time
▲* ''[[GURPS]] Time Travel'''s standard scenario states that you can only travel to time "windows", about three months apart (and slowly growing farther apart), that are dragged forward as normal time passes. Why this happens, along with what happened at the point the windows initially extended from, is an unexplained mystery. It should be noted, however, that this is only one of several options provided by GURPS Time Travel - it has rules to cover nearly every version of [[Time Travel]] on this site (if not more.)
* The old ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]'' roleplaying game supplement
▲** In an even better example of the trope, the same GURPS Time Travel setting has relative time rates for time travelers -- every 10 days spent in the past equals one day elapsed in the present, so there's no "coming back to the second you left." The rate can change though, if time gets messed with ... so not only is the clock in San Dimas always ticking, it can change speed!
▲* The old [[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]] supplement "Transdimensional TMNT" had a suprisingly complex justification for [[San Dimas Time]] that involved the time stream coiling around itself in predictable patterns and jumping from coil to coil where they touched.
== Video Games ==
* [[Real Time Strategy|RTS]] game ''[[Achron]]'' involves this, though more for gameplay purposes. The present is always moving, and any viewing of the past or future will by default involve the player moving through time at the same speed as the present. Changing any specific point in time also becomes harder as the present moves away from it, for [[Competitive Balance|balance reasons]]. However, the changes made in the past are periodically propagated faster than the player can go by [[Delayed Ripple Effect|timewaves]], and the player can control their rate of movement through time. For example, fast forwarding will cause one to catch up to the present eventually, propagating changes along the way.
** To put it simply, if somebody else changes the past, you really do only have X amount of time to get back into the past yourself (or send a time-traveling unit back) and prevent that change from becoming irrevocable. But in the contextual structure given for time travel, this ''makes perfect sense''.
* The video game ''Shadow of Destiny'' uses this. Since the time in the present is counting down to the time of your inevitable death, it puts a time limit on all the puzzles you need to solve in the past, even though San Dimas Time doesn't really make much sense.* The ''Journeyman Project'' series of computer games were all dependent on this trope. In those games, whenever something in the past is altered, it creates "temporal ripples" that take a certain amount of
* The Time Gates of ''[[
* [[Handwaved]] in ''[[Carmen Sandiego|Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?]]'' where it's state that legal time travel has to be cleared with a federal agency, and thus each Chrono-Skimmer will return to the present after a certain number of hours of machine use. Of course, the villains have no such problem.
* Every time you hear the words "Oh no! WE'VE GOT TO HURRY!" in
** There was a level timer in ''[[
* The mandatory surfing stages in ''Mario's Time Machine'' for the Super NES are timed. As [[
* ''[[Day of the Tentacle]]'' seems to utilize this trope to an extent: The three main characters are stuck in the present, 200 years in the past, and 200 years in the future respectively, and events that happen in the past affect the characters in the future. For example, one character in the past can convince George Washington to cut down a tree in the yard, causing the tree to vanish into a stump in future timelines and another character (who is stuck to the tree by her underwear) to fall on her ass.
* A version that actually makes sense in ''Chronotron'' - in one level, your time machine is on a lever controlled by an inaccessible button with a bomb on it. You must complete whatever you need to do before the bomb explodes, the lever goes away and your time machine falls into oblivion. And no, you can't just arrive earlier, because it doesn't work that way.
* [[Justified]] and used as a plot point in [[The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Ages]], as the [[Big Bad]] has stopped time at high noon around the construction site for the final dungeon. No matter how quickly you progress, [[You Can't Thwart Stage One|you can't stop the tower from being built.]]
** However, rather than appear completed instantaneously to your present self, the tower being built in the past progresses in increments as you progress through the plot.
* The high concept of ''[[Spider
* In the [[Rare]] NES game ''Time Lord'', the clock is always running in 2999, and you have one year to [[Save the World]] by traveling through four historical time zones.
== Web Comics ==
* Averted, but referenced, in ''Superosity'': because there is no
** Superosity author Chris Crosby has the same problem in another series he writes, [[Wicked Powered]]. The characters are some kind of chrono-police, and they jump back in forth between time limits, such as being required to leave in mid-mission to another mission because of presumable
▲* Averted, but referenced, in ''Superosity'': because there is no [[San Dimas Time]], the characters aged while time travelling but returned to [[The Present]] a millisecond later, the characters worry that their birthdays might have changed to compensate.
* Played with [http://www.the-whiteboard.com/autowb183.html here] in ''[[
▲** Superosity author Chris Crosby has the same problem in another series he writes, [[Wicked Powered]]. The characters are some kind of chrono-police, and they jump back in forth between time limits, such as being required to leave in mid-mission to another mission because of presumable [[San Dimas Time]], yet having the option to travel back to any point in their own timeline to correct the myriad of mistakes they make (such as blowing up the earth, among others)
* Almost justified in ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]''. At the end of ''The Storm Breaker Saga'', it's revealed the time travelling in this and previous stories has worked as follows: {{spoiler|First, the demon K'Z'K is
▲* Played with [http://www.the-whiteboard.com/autowb183.html here] in ''[[The Whiteboard (Webcomic)|The Whiteboard]]''.
* ''[[Homestuck]]'' calls this [http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/Circumstantial_simultaneity circumstantial simultaneity]. It expresses how two events can happen "at the same time", even if they're ''not'' happening at the same time or if the events are in different timelines altogether.
▲* Almost justified in ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]''. At the end of ''The Storm Breaker Saga'', it's revealed the time travelling in this and previous stories has worked as follows: {{spoiler|First, the demon K'Z'K is blast into the past accidentally, taking with him Gwynn's soul, leaving Gwynn's body in a coma in the present. He "cuts a noticeable trail" through time and space. Next, Riff's malfunctioning time machine sends Zoe and Torg into the past along that same trail (though it seems they actually arrive somewhat after K'Z'K, which would probably be a blatant example of this trope). They fight and temporarily destroy K'Z'K in that time, whereupon Gwynn's soul returns through time to her body to the present. In the present, Riff and Dr. Schlock have been trying to figure out a way to go after Torg and Zoe for some time, not knowing what time they went to. When Gwynn regains consciousness, she is able to report seeing them, and Riff travels along the trail her soul left, thus explaining why he only arrives in the time after Torg and Zoe have defeated K'Z'K. The question that remains unanswered, besides of why Torg and Zoe don't appear in exactly the same time as K'Z'K, is: why didn't Gwynn's soul return to the time when it left her? One theory is that Gwynn's soul had to maintain a chronological parallel with the physical component.}}
▲* ''[[Homestuck]]'' calls this [http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/Circumstantial_simultaneity circumstantial simultaneity]. It expresses how two events can happen "at the same time", even if they're ''not'' happening at the same time or if the events are in different timelines altogether.
** An example of this in action is the big End of Act 5 Flash, [S] Cascade, which involves no less than four different chronologies happening "simultaneously". For example, the villain {{spoiler|destroys a universe from the outside, shortly after that universe was created. At the "same time", his past self in the future of the same universe is trying to escape from it's destruction. This universe then explodes at the "same time" as another universe, even though the second universe had existed ''before'' the first one.}}
** In Act 6 {{spoiler|two characters are given a chat program that let's the communicate with two other characters in the distant past. The program is basically designed to run on San Dimas Time.}}
* During ''[[
== Western Animation ==
* Happened in an episode of the ''[[Men in Black (
* ''[[The Jetsons]] [[Crossover|Meet]] [[The Flintstones]]''.
* In the
* An episode of ''[[
** Another episode had the Superfriends travelling back in time to stop time-travelling villains from changing their origins. Flash arrives on Paradise Island in time for the tournament where Diana won the right to travel to the world of men. "I hope I'm not too late!" Flash exclaims. Well, Barry, if you ''are'', you could just run back another three hours into the past and try again, couldn't you?
* Completely thrown out the window in the ''[[Justice League Unlimited]]'' episodes ''The Once and Future Thing.'' The timeline was described as [[Techno Babble|becoming fluid]], with different time periods merging together because of how much it was screwed up.
* An episode of [[Biker Mice From Mars]] had the [[Big Bad]] (probably some kind of alien named after cheese, but who cares?) travelling into the past to demolish the city by digging giant holes where it would be built. Whenever he finished digging a hole, it would appear ''at the same time in the future'' in the middle of the city. Then again, what did you expect from a show about ''biker mice from Mars''?
* This trope is integral to the second season of ''[[
== Real Life ==
* In one proposed mechanism of time-travel, one end of a wormhole is flown around for a bit at near-lightspeed, which makes it
** If you think about it, this wormhole is really a [[Portal to
** In short, the clock is always running in San Dimas, but it's subject to time dilation, and isn't guaranteed to run at a constant speed.
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