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San Dimas Time: Difference between revisions
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'''San Dimas Time''' is used when a writer wants to add some against-the-clock tension to a [[Time Travel]] story without thinking too hard about how little sense that makes.
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]].
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