Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

The character receives foreknowledge of what will happen (or, if [[Time Travel]] is involved, [[Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory]] will allow them to remember what happened "the first time around") and has to [[Rubber Band History|correct it.]]

#Usually only one attempt to correct it is necessary or in fact possible.

 

 

 

Often the adventurer has to travel to fix things, combining this premise with [[Adventure Towns]]. This premise has also been applied to literature rather than time, with characters trapped in a [[Portal Book]] interfering with the book's original plot and being forced to set things back on track to resolve "the right way."

{{examples}}

== Series Plots ==

* The plot of ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro ni]]'' once the protagonists realize that they've {{spoiler|been trapped in a [[Groundhog Day Loop]]}} of murder, insanity and betrayal. {{spoiler|Rika and Hanyuu knew from the beginning, and were trying to save the town, but eventually nearly gave up.}}

* ''[[Steins;Gate]]'' runs on this trope. The protagonist Okabe voluntarily relives the same couple of hours over and over {{spoiler|as he tries and fails repeatedly to prevent his childhood friend Mayuri's death.}} Then, upon realizing {{spoiler|that doing so is futile, he instead opts to send new messages to the past in order to counteract every previous D-mail that's been sent.}} The series ends with a truly [[Mind Screw]]y plan {{spoiler|put together by his future self to physically travel back to the past and save his love interest by fooling his past self into thinking she's dead.}}

* {{spoiler|[[The Stoic|Homura]]}} from ''[[Puella Magi Madoka Magica]]'' leaps time to save {{spoiler|Madoka}} from becoming a {{spoiler|''[[Magical Girl]]''}}, or more commonly known as a {{spoiler|[[Our Liches Are Different|Lich]]}} that may transform in the future into a {{spoiler|[[The Heartless|wit]][[Eldritch Abomination|ch]]}}. {{spoiler|This being a [[Deconstruction]], each successive attempt only makes things worse. However, each attempt manages to make Madoka stronger until she [[Ascended to A Higher Plane of Existence]] upon making her contract in this timeline}}.

* One of the arcs in ''[[Kurohime]]'' involves two of the titled character's foes (Kurohime considered a bad guy in that world) going back in time to try and kill her, for personal reason (revenge being the main motive, but also to keep the father of one of them being killed by her.) {{spoiler|Its a bit of a twofer subvision. 1) They realize Kurohime not as evil as they figured and learn the reason behind her motives and 2) ''They'' wind up inadvertently causing the events that lead to the father's death. Kurohime wasn't even trying to kill him but took the blame anyway.}}

 

* ''[[Exiles]]'' was supposedly pitched as ''[[Quantum Leap]]'' or ''[[Sliders]]'' with superheroes.

* ''[[Booster Gold]]'' does this quite a bit as the secret protector of the time line. It's when he has to set wrong what once went right or keep wrong what once went wrong that things get really morally complicated for him.

* In Marvel's ''[[Civil War (Comic Book)|Civil War]]'' storyline, the entire event was kicked off when Namorita, a member of the [[New Warriors]], fought a villain named Nitro whose ability was to explode. Said explosion killed hundreds, including Namorita herself. Because of this, Namorita's name was posthumously slandered with the rest of the [[New Warriors]], much to the chagrin of her ex-lover, Richard Ryder aka [[Nova]], even though they'd been broken up for years at that point. In his eponymous series, Nova is plucked out of the timestream along with a Namorita who is obviously from an era not only before the Civil War incident, but while she and Ryder were still lovers. Later, when the cosmic forces that threw them together start to send them back where they belong, Nova (being a [[Paragon]]-type character), refuses to let Namorita return to her own time (where she'll be doomed to repeat the same fate) and brings her to the present instead...consequences be damned.

* In an issue of ''Marvel Two-in-One'', the Thing goes back in time to cure his past self of being an orange-skinned monster and change his own life, but only succeeds in creating an alternate timeline where a now-human Ben Grimm quits the [[Fantastic Four]] and is replaced by Spider-Man. This becomes [[Make Wrong What Once Went Right]] in a follow-up story, when it is revealed that the absence of the Thing on the FF results in [[Planet Eater|Galactus]] succeeding in his initial attempt to feed on the Earth, leaving the remnants of humanity with a [[Crapsack World]] low in vital resources.

 

* In the ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'' Fanfic/Play by post story [http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Abaddon#Abaddon.27s_14th_Black_Crusade Abaddon Quest], there's a rather amusing [[Inverted Trope|Inversion]], the eponymous Chaos Lord and his flunkies travel back in time to kill the [[God-Emperor]] as a baby, which is to say they travel back to Set Wrong What Once Went Right. Considering [[Image Boards|/tg/'s]] [[General Failure|Opinion]] of Abaddon, [[Failure Is the Only Option]]. As is [[Hilarity Ensues|Hilarity.]]

* ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]''

** Played straight in ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3480810/1/Going_another_Way Going Another Way]'', where {{spoiler|Rei, [[My God, What Have I Done?|horrified]] with her direct hand in causing the Third Impact, decides to go back in time to diverge the timeline in such a way that while the core events still transpire, several differences also occur. The major one being that she steered Gendo's thoughts into sending Shinji to live with a much more caring and compassionate guardian, an action resulting in a much more strong willed and self-assured Shinji.}}

* The ''[[Pony POV Series]]'' [[Recursive Fanfiction]] ''[http://fav.me/d4lrntt Fading Futures]'' has Twilight Tragedy manage to break free of Discord's control in the [[Bad Future|Epilogue timeline]] and seek to change the past so that Discord never won in the first place. She manages to do so, but as a result, the timeline she inhabits no longer exists and everything in it are "reborn" into their main timeline counterparts. {{spoiler|Realizing this, she invokes her [[Super-Powered Evil Side]], Nightmare Purgatory, to take her revenge on Discord before the "rebirth" is complete. She realizes at the last moment she's dangerously close to becoming [[She Who Fights Monsters]] and manages to stop herself from finishing the job, prefering to [[Dying as Yourself|fade away as Twilight Sparkle]] instead of becoming a monster, [[What You Are in the Dark|even if no one, not even her, will ever know]].}}

 

* ''[[The Girl Who Leapt Through Time]]'' involves a girl who learns she has time-traveling powers, but each jump makes things worse. She has to stop herself from screwing everything up over and over.

* In ''[[Triangle]]'' this is what Jess tries to do after she realized she's in a [[Groundhog Day Loop]]. {{spoiler|But it only created another timeline which we don't see completely in the movie.}}

* Most of the ''[[Back to the Future (film)|Back to The Future]]'' sequels: the second one begins with Doc taking Marty to the future to stop his son from getting arrested, and then having to go into the past to stop teenage Biff from using a [[Timeline-Altering MacGuffin]] to become [[Screw the Rules, I Have Money|evil and rich]]. The third movie has Marty go back to 1885 to stop Doc from getting shot by Buford Tannen. The main problem in the first movie, however, is Marty's fault to begin with. However, Marty's eventual solution to this problem has the unexpected bonus of his father being more confident and assertive over Biff in 1985, leading to this trope in a roundabout way.

* The two [[Time Travel|time travelers]] in each of the ''[[Terminator (franchise)|Terminator]]'' films are each trying to [[Terminator Twosome|set right the wrong the other one caused]].

* The film ''[[Frequency]]'' is about a man who can communicate with his dead father through a family ham radio thanks to an Aurora Borealis that appeared in the same timespan between 1969 and current-day 1999. He uses this communication to save his father from his impending death in a warehouse fire, but that sets off a chain of events that lead to his mother's death, so the two work together to fix that, but then... et al.

* ''[[Primer]]''. The plot involves {{spoiler|Aaron going back in time twice to save Abe's girlfriend, Rachel, from her psychotic ex-boyfriend. Thomas Granger, Rachel's father, is believed to have come back for similar reasons, but we never find out exactly what his motives were.}}

 

* [[Teresa Edgerton]]'s ''[[Celydonn]]'' books, specifically ''The Grail and the Ring'', have an interesting take on this. Strictly speaking, [[Time Travel]] is not possible. However, [[Functional Magic]] allows one to travel to the Inner Celydonn, to a shadow of the past, where one can see what really happened if one doesn't try to derail events. This quasi-[[Time Travel]] is used to find out What Once Went Wrong, so that it can be Set Right in the present, thus avoiding any [[Temporal Paradox]]es.

* The ''[[The Caretaker Trilogy]]'' Trilogy focuses on people from a future where the world's ecosystem has been ruined coming back to the present: the "Turning Point", or the point at which it was theorized to still be possible to reverse the damage done. Their foes, who actually ''like'' the future as it is, also come back, with the aim of speeding up the damage, and ensuring their own victory.

** Diana Wynne Jones likes this trope. In ''Witch Week'' a cataclysmic event has caused an alternate universe to split off, which is identical to ours in every way except that magic exists and witches are persecuted and burned. In order to merge the universes, the characters have to work out what the cataclysm was, and use their combined magic to change history so the universes will never have split in the first place. As a side-effect, various characters' parents haven't been executed or imprisoned in the new universe.

** In ''A Tale of Time City'' there's a lot of time travelling, but you can only change the past in an "unstable era". The characters travel three times to the same station platform in 1939 in an attempt to change the results of events, but the results are unpredictable and they never manage to improve the situation. Meanwhile, the changes they cause create greater instability each time...

* The capacity for doing this appears in the later books of [[Peter F. Hamilton]]'s ''Void Trilogy''. It turns out that "The Void", a [[Pocket Dimension]] accessible via a giant singularity has a "reset to time X" function built in, accessible to anyone that knows it's there; as is traditional everyone but the resetter forgets the original timeline. (The downside is that the act of rewinding an entire dimension needs lots of energy, and the Void obtains that by expanding and eating a bit more of the surrounding "real" galaxy's mass. This isn't very popular in the real galaxy.)

 

* The [[Trope Namer]] is ''[[Quantum Leap]]'', whose entire plot is a series of these.

* ''[[Tru Calling]]'': Tru does this in almost every episode. A number of twists and variations of the trope are also used.

* Appears to be the premise of the lamentably late NBC series ''[[Journeyman]]''.

** One episode revolves around him trying to undo something he did by accidentally leaving his digital camera in the 70s. He returns home to find that computer technology is decades ahead of what it was (holographic screens and video-newspapers are commonplace), but his son was never born (he was delayed at work due to a computer error), replaced instead by a daughter who was conceived a few days later. Despite his wife's objections, he goes back and fixes it.

* The main plot of the first three seasons of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'', though this is more of a case of Set Right What Will Go Wrong. Name dropped by Hiro in Season 5's "PassFail" during his all-in-his-coma-mind-trial, and Mental!Adam/Kensei rightfully points out that he's simply reciting the opening to ''Quantum Leap''.

* Another example of this is the CBC drama, ''[[Being Erica]]'', where the majority of episodes were centred around her travelling back to a point in her past where she tries to put right something, she believes, went wrong in her life. Normally it would turn out that actually she needed to learn a lesson from that event and her changes wouldn't help her life that much. {{spoiler|There were also a couple of episodes that varied from this format but stayed true to this theme. One where she was required to make changes to the life of the man sending her back in time, another where she managed to make a huge change in her life by stopping her brother's accidental death. This ended up to make her life drastically different and he still died but at a different time in his life and in a different way. Also, in another episode she had to travel forwards in time to learn about another time traveller's life as the version of him she knew in her present time was actually the past version of his actual self. He was refusing to make the changes he needed to and she had to convince him to make the changes he needed to and return to his own time.}}

 

* Ludo's rock opera ''Broken Bride'' follows an obsessed scientist, who invents a time machine so he can go back and stop his wife from dying in a car accident.

 

* An elementary tactic in ''[[Achron]]''. Occurs often in multiplayer games as a response to another player [[Make Wrong What Once Went Right|screwing with your past]].

* Basically the whole premise of ''[[Daikatana]]'', although the main characters spend so much time screwing around in the mythic past that one could be forgiven for thinking it was otherwise.

** This is the premise of the fan-made [[Game Mod]] ''Marathon: Eternal''. Earth is devastated by an interstellar war, and the hero is sent back in time to ensure that Humanity wins. Avoids a [[Temporal Paradox]] because the [[Lost Technology]] doing the time traveling can also jump between different dimensions - the plan is to create an alternate timeline where Earth isn't destroyed and transport the refugees from the original Earth there.

* We learn in the end of ''[[Arc the Lad]] 2'' that {{spoiler|It was the reason behind Arc's father disappearance: he tried to set things right, and failed}}

* In ''Dark Fall 2: Lights Out'', Parker stumbles into a time portal while investigating the disappearance of some lighthouse keepers, and discovers {{spoiler|both the reason they vanished, and that ''he'll'' be blamed by history for murdering them if he doesn't fulfill this trope}}. Likewise, while ''Darkfall: The Journal'' {{spoiler|doesn't actually involve time travel, it does give the hero a chance to avert What Went Wrong, by foiling a supernatural menace ''in the present''}}.

* The overarching plot of the popular ''[[Half-Life (series)|Half-Life]]'' Timeline mod trilogy. Scientists at Black Mesa discovered time travel as a corollary to the dimensional portal technology they were working on... and gave it to the Nazis. Now Gordon must travel to the ends of time and even to parallel Earths to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and stop the [[Stupid Jetpack Hitler|Nazi timeship fleet]], {{spoiler|eventually, after all else has failed, traveling back to Black Mesa a few hours before the Resonance Cascade event to stop the fateful experiment before it even began}}.

* In the [[Interactive Fiction]] game ''[[Jigsaw]]'', the ''antagonist'' is trying to set right what once went wrong (preventing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for example), while the player character must try to keep history on track. (At least, that's how it starts; then it gets a bit [[Alternate History|more complicated]].)

* ''[[Radiant Historia]]'' is about a soldier who is given a book called the White Chronicle, allowing him to travel back to certain points in time on his journey to help guide the world to its "correct" history (i.e. one that doesn't lead to its destruction through constantly-expanding desertification). Invoking this trope is required to complete the game. Many other temporal tropes apply at various points in the game, but this trope pops up beautifully in a simple sidequest: a woman is mourning the death of her husband from sickness, saying "if only he'd taken this medicine...". To complete the sidequest, just travel back in time with the medicine and give it to the husband (saying it's from his wife). Both husband and wife will be mystified about how you knew and where it came from, as the wife hadn't told you yet about her husband, but that fixes the future so they both live and are grateful.

** Unfortunately, there is an alternate version of you, who has been recruited by the Microids to stop you. He will randomly show up at any point in the past to destroy one of the races, undoing all your hard work. You can't kill him, just as you yourself can't be killed.

** Interestingly, the creators originally planned to have a [[Nonstandard Game Over]] if you happen to have screwed up the history of the four races so much that it can't be fixed. Your ship would be destroyed by a powerful temporal storm. Then they realized that this could never happen in-game, and eventually removed that ending.

 

* This trope is the entire purpose of the game ''[[Time Hollow]]'', where the main character is completely normal except that he can use his "Hollow Pen" to make a window into the past and alter an event.

 

* The [http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/timelines/the_strangerverse?s=strangerverse "Strangerverse"] in [[AlternateHistory.com]] has its basic premise as this.

** In the ''[[United States of Ameriwank]]'', the traveler came to Colonial America before the American Revolution and gave George Washington a mission to unite the world under the United States to prevent an apocalyptic war.

** Almost all of the Strangerverse stories take as their basic premise that there was an apocalyptic war shortly before 2258, and that a group used prototype time-travel technology to send one person back in time long enough to hand over a few tools to an historic figure and tell the recipient why he is doing so. Just when and where the Stranger travels to, what tools are delivered, and whether the destination was the intended destination provide the -verse part of the Strangerverse.

 

* The ''Peabody and Sherman'' segments of ''[[Rocky and Bullwinkle]]'' involve going back in time to correct historical events which have gone wrong.

* This sets the events of ''[[Megas XLR]]'' into motion through subversion of the trope. The Human Resistance steals a prototype Glorft mecha, modifies it, and attempts to send it and its pilot back in time to prevent the Glorft from winning the war against humanity. Things don't go as planned, and as a result the Glorft invasion actually happens centuries before it's supposed to. [[Hilarity Ensues]].

 

== Episode or Character Plots ==

* In the ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' manga, this is Chao Lingshen's motivation for messing around with her great grandfather's childhood, although whether she had an absurdly complicated [[Xanatos Gambit]] set up, or was simply playing [[Xanatos Speed Chess]] as her alterations made foreknowledge less useful is never made clear. She actually fixed the problem she went back to solve with the changes wrought by her first trip, but later makes a second one to tie up a loose end or two before the [[Cosmic Deadline]].

* Subverted in ''[[Dragonball Z]]''. Future Trunks also attempts to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, but he does this in a timeline not his own: since in DBZ every timeline counts as another dimension, any changes made in the current time will not directly effect Future Trunks' past or future. He still wants to help out, hoping to create at least one peaceful world, and to return to his own time strong enough to finally stop what he wanted to prevent.

* A great part of the ''[[Haruhi Suzumiya]]'' [[Light Novels]] deals with Kyon trying to rectify past events in order not to let Haruhi's powers go haywire. Although he travels back in time mainly to set Haruhi off so that she'd create aliens, time travellers and ESPers, and to fix up the events on December 18. On that day, there's a point in time where there's 3 Mikurus and 4 Kyons. December 18 was only because of ''Disappearance'', and to fix what Yuki did.

* ''[[Yakitate!! Japan]]'': Kazuma's last bread of the second [[Tournament Arc]] is so amazingly delicious, it ''[[Crowning Moment of Awesome|sends the judge back in time to RetCon his own mother's death]]''.

 

* Rayek from ''[[Elf Quest]]'' travels to the ''future'' in an attempt to 'save' his space-travelling ancestors from being thrown back in time and crashing on the planet. Unfortunately, all their descendants currently living on this planet will then cease to exist—and will never have existed, since their ancestors will never have set foot on the planet in the first place. Opinions about whether or not this is a good thing differ—he thinks it's good, everyone else thinks it's bad. [[A God Am I|Who cares about other men's opinion anyway.]] He tried to compromise by having the people he actually knew and cared about stay inside the palace, which would protect them from the history-wiping effects... but since this would only save the people standing immediately in front of him, and still wipe out everyone else on the planet, they refused his offer. {{spoiler|When confronted with the choice between annihilating everyone he ever loved, and preventing ten thousand years of suffering, he ends up suffering a BSOD and losing his powers.}}

* In the "Camelot Falls" storyline in the ''[[Superman]]'' comics, a prophetic sorcerer tells him what he needs to do to avert the extinction of humanity years down the line. In a subversion of this trope, Superman refuses to comply, namely because "what he needs to do" involves not preventing the deaths of countless innocents.

* The mission of Samaritan in ''[[Astro City]]''. He actually did set things right before the series started, but now his own time period has [[Stranger in a Familiar Land|changed beyond recognition]].

* Archie's ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (comics)|Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' series:

** Silver's personal [[Story Arc]] is much the same as in ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (2006 video game)||Sonic the Hedgehog 2006]]''—he comes from a [[Bad Future]] where the world is all but destroyed, and is constantly traveling through time trying to find a way to undo it, with his only clue being that the betrayal of a member of the Freedom Fighters was somehow key to this disaster. Of course, like his game counterpart he's being advised by a -- supposedly reformed --- villain, so we'll have to wait and see how that turns out.

* In the ''[[Star Trek]]'' "Time Crime" miniseries, someone screwed up the timeline so that Klingons aren't aggressive warmongers and the Romulan Empire doesn't exist. Despite the positive bits, Kirk and Spock still have to fix everything because the overall outcome would ultimately be a [[Bad Future]]. That and, as bad as Romulans are, they don't deserve to be ''erased from time''. In one Tearjerker moment, Kirk realizes that "fixing" the timeline will mean losing his son David (in the real timeline David was killed by Klingons), and he gives his son one final hug before embarking on his trip through time.

 

* In ''[[Galaxy Quest]]'', the "Omega 13" device is used to go back 13 seconds in time, "enough to change a single mistake".

* In the conclusion and epilogue of ''[[Jumanji]]'', Alan prevents Carl Bentley from getting fired (or gets him re-hired), and the kids' parents are stopped from going on their fatal ski trip.

* This is the main plot of ''[[Star Trek: First Contact]]''. The past is going perfectly fine until the Borg try and set wrong what once was right.

 

* ''[[Animorphs]]'':

** In ''Elfangor's Secret'', the team is sent back to prevent Visser Four from changing key events in the past. {{spoiler|Unfortunately, those changes were much more far-reaching than either side anticipated, and would've prevented the Holocaust, though likely still making a worse future. So in order to [[Reset Button|return the present to normal]], the team has to [[Shoot the Dog|essentially condemn millions to death]]. Eventually they decide on paradoxing out the events of the novel, deciding that at least this way it happened naturally.}}

** In ''In the Time of the Dinosaurs'', they must sabotage a nuclear device and sacrifice an entire colony of aliens, or else the Cretaceous Era won't end on schedule.

* In the novel ''[[Soon I Will Be Invincible]]'', Lily gets sent back in time to prevent a blight from wiping out humanity, but after she succeeds she decides she liked the blighted future better and becomes a supervillain to try to bring back her original future. However, this turns out to be an outright lie—she's a native of the current time period, although the era she claims as her origin really ''is'' a possible future that she has visited—and she ends up using it to trick another supervillain into saving the world.

* [[Dean Koontz]]'s ''Lightning'' {{spoiler|features a time-travelling protagonist who goes back to his own time, after having thwarted a Nazi Time Travel plot, and tells Winston Churchill about the Cold War. When he returns to the future, The Cold War never happened, as the Allies kept on pushing eastward after the Nazis surrendered, defeating the communists before the Cold War ever started.}}

 

* Naturally, ''[[Life On Mars]]'' and ''[[Ashes to Ashes]]'' have played with this: in Sam's case, it was finding out why his father abandoned him, as well as arresting the serial killer who'd kidnapped his girlfriend and a crime lord who'd had a witness in his custody murdered; in Alex's, it was preventing her parents' death by car bomb. Their success rates are... varied; Sam eventually wound up ''convincing'' his father to skip town, because there was that little matter of a murder and racketeering charge if he stayed...

* ''[[Doctor Who]]''

** [[Russell T. Davies]]' view was that this Dalek-Time Lord skirmishing eventually led to the Time War of the new series, thus subverting the trope. Alternatively, this could be playing the trope straight, as the Time War may actually be a ''better'' outcome than what the Time Lords originally predicted.

* In the ''Mirror, Mirror'' series, there is exactly ''one'' person who was trained to do this exactly ''once'', as revealed in the final episode. Everything prior to this point had already happened in her mentor's past.

* More of a case of "Set right what we messed up" but in an episode of ''[[Hannah Montana]]'', Miley and Jackson travel back in time and mess up their parents meeting. Cue a back to the future style disappearance for Jackson as Miley tries to set things right. It was probably [[All Just a Dream]].

* This is Desmond's major character motivation throughout the third season of ''[[Lost]]'' (apart from his desire to be reunited with his lost love Penny).

* ''[[Farscape]]''

* ''[[The X-Files]]'' episode "Synchrony" presents the case of a strange old man warning an MIT student and professor that the student is going to die at a specific time—because of this warning the professor, attempting to save the student, ends up accidentally pushing him into the path of an oncoming bus and thus the warning is a [[Self-Fulfilling Prophecy]]. The old man is {{spoiler|actually the professor from the future, who has traveled back in time}} attempting to Set Right What Will Go Wrong and prevent an impending scientific breakthrough {{spoiler|that would be made by the professor in collaboration with his girlfriend, also a scientist, and the student, and which would be a catalyst for a catastrophic technological development.}} Mulder cites an old theory of Scully's about how [[You Can't Fight Fate]], and so the old man's efforts are probably doomed. {{spoiler|Although the professor manages to kill both his present and future selves and erase all of his files, as the episode ends, the girlfriend is continuing the research on her own with backups of the erased data.}}

* The conclusion of the ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' "Year of Hell" serial. Or for that matter, the conclusion to the series altogether.

* ''[[Kamen Rider Den-O]]'' touches on this occasionally, in the context of "You are not supposed to do this".

** Kintaros nearly gets kicked off DenLiner in one episode when he tries to change a girls past for the better instead of dealing with the [[Monster of the Week]] (who was damaging the timeline himself in the meantime).

* In ''[[Primeval]]'', Matt spends the majority of season four and five doing this to prevent a [[Bad Future]]. {{spoiler|Although, as he doesn't know exactly what went wrong, and doesn't find out what went wrong until halfway through season five, he spends most of the time tracking the wrong person and helping prevent a bad present.}}

* The ''[[Mysterious Ways]]'' episode "Yesterday" deals with a police officer who relives the previous day after accidentally shooting and killing his partner and praying for some way to make it right.

 

* ''[[Red vs. Blue]]'' uses the [[Stable Time Loop]] variety of this trope. When Church is blasted into the past by a nuclear explosion, he uses the opportunity to try and correct each disaster that has occurred in the series up to that point. Of course, it turns out he's the cause of most of them, including his CO's mysterious heart failure, numerous injuries to his teammates, and his ''own'' accidental death ("Oh my god! ''I'm'' the team-killing fucktard!"). When his every attempt to prevent the bomb from going off fails, he eventually gives up, makes sure a copy of himself is blasted into the future with his teammates, and delivers a bitter [[Aesop]] about accepting reality as it is.

 

* The ''[[Ravenloft]]'' boxed-set adventure "Castles Forlorn" sends the heroes to a haunted castle which shifts repeatedly between three time periods. They have the opportunity to free an imprisoned woman while in the second of these eras, which causes corresponding historical changes to the third.

 

** The temporal organization Ouroborous gave player characters the ability to do this to their own timelines with pretty much no oversight at all.

* In ''[[Pokémon Mystery Dungeon]]: Explorers of Time'' and ''[[Pokémon Mystery Dungeon]]: Explorers of Darkness'', before ending up in the past with amnesia the player character was part of a team that has come from the future to prevent time from stopping. Succeeding in the mission causes a [[Temporal Paradox]], causing both you and everyone met in the future to cease to exist. Except then the partner you met at the beginning of the game angsts until [[Anthropomorphic Personification|Dialga]] decides you do get to exist after all.

* The plot of ''[[Ratchet and Clank Future A Crack In Time]]''. {{spoiler|Subverted in that it turns out to be impossible and/or will only result in tearing the universe apart.}}

* Fails ''spectacularly'' in ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]'' series.

* The entire plot of ''[[Mortal Kombat 9]]'' centers around an attempt to do this. Shao Kahn ends up winning the events of Armageddon, leading Raiden to send a message back to his past self to try and fix this. {{spoiler|He ends up nearly bungling the whole thing. In the end, every single one of the Forces of Light save for Johnny Cage, Sonya, and himself are dead, their souls taken by Quan Chi. Shao Kahn is defeated, averting THAT particular Armageddon event, but Quan Chi has an army of powerful souls at his command now, and the ending implies that Shinnok and the Netherrealm are preparing to attack next...}}

* Deconstructed in Episode 4 of the ''[[Back to the Future (film)|Back to The Future]]'' games, where {{spoiler|Citizen Brown doesn't like the idea that setting right what once went wrong means that the prudish Edna Strickland goes on to be a miserable old [[Crazy Cat Lady]] in the proper timeline, choosing instead to find a way to make sure that Young Emmett Brown ends up with Edna without her becoming a [[Knight Templar]] by making sure that he never develops his passion for science}}.

* This is part of the theme around {{spoiler|Asriel Dreemurr a.k.a Flowey}} in ''[[Undertale]]'' {{spoiler|When revived as a flower, Asriel at first tries to use his RESETting powers to bring some amount of happiness to the Underground to compensate for his failure at liberating the monsters, but because he lacked a soul he didn't get any pleasure when he finally succeeded. Eventually he became so bored he began to ruin other people lives for fun, and soon the sociopathing, murderous Flowey was born. When Asriel finally recovers his former form and aquires incomensurable power, he basically plans to use these powers for doing the ultimate reset, to erase everything and begin anew, in the hopes that it brings back his decesed sibling too.}}

 

* Played completely straight in ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'', right down to the "only one chance."

* Inverted in ''[[Chainsawsuit]]'', with [http://chainsawsuit.com/2009/06/10/strip-231/ The Time Ruiner!]

* Done in ''[[General Protection Fault]]'' in the "Serruptitious Machinations" Arc.

* [[Bad Future]] {{spoiler|Dave Strider}} in ''[[Homestuck]]'' uses his [[Time Travel]] ability to try and stop John [[Horrible Judge of Character|from being a gullible idiot.]] It appears to have worked and the protagonists get a lot of [[Disk One Nuke|sweet loot from the future]] out of the deal as well.

* Yehuda's motivation for working as a bike mechanic in ''[[Yehuda Moon and The Kickstand Cyclery]]''. {{spoiler|Not because he's pro-bike, but because he's helping the Shakers after inadvertently destroying their livelyhood.}}

* Late in the course of ''[[Narbonic]]'', Artie and Mell discover a secret tape that was sent from a [[Bad Future]]. Future Mell did a host of bad things including becoming vice-president and then having the president assassinated, all so she could use one shot at time travel, even though it would kill her and destroy the universe. Her goal? To save Artie. She thinks that killing protagonist Dave Davenport will fix things. ''And she is wrong.'' {{spoiler|Dave has become unstuck in time and now knows one obscure thing that will allow him to change the future.}}

 

* ''[[The Fairly OddParents]]'', episode "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker". Timmy's attempts to stop his teacher from growing up to become a fairy-obsessed maniac result in him lamenting, "[[Stable Time Loop|NO! This is exactly what I was trying to ''prevent'']]!" To clarify {{spoiler|Timmy finds out Crocker had fairies (''his'' fairies in fact) in his childhood and was actually quite beloved by the town. But at the ceremony they were throwing for him, Timmy accidentally reveals them to the whole crowd. Granted it wasn't his fault though as Cosmo turned the power to the mics back on in his usual bout of stupidity. And even then the original timeline would've had Cosmo stupidly blurt out their existence anyway. Say the least it all went downhill after that.}} At least he stopped the election of [[Richard Nixon|President McGovern]].

* The first ''[[Futurama]]'' movie "Bender's Big Score" deals extensively with time travel, ending with Bender going back to the year 2000 with the tattoo on the time duplicate Fry's ass to put the tattoo back onto past-frozen Fry's ass in the first place, for any of the plot to make sense.

* Future Candace travels back in time after she discovers that her meddling with the timeline has turned the tri-state area into a dystopia ruled by Doofenshmirtz in the ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]'' episode "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo".

* This is the goal of Nox, the [[Big Bad]] from season 1 of the French cartoon ''[[Wakfu]]''. His desire to save the family that he lost 200 years before the show has [[The Determinator|driven him]] to go from a simple watchmaker to one of the most powerful [[With Great Power Comes Great Insanity|(and insane)]] magic users alive. Unfortunately, while he is a skilled enough time mage to [[Time Stands Still|slow time to a stand still,]] he has so far been unable to actually travel backwards in time. He believes that this is [[Powered by a Forsaken Child|a power requirement issue,]] and now seeks to drain enough wakfu from the plants, animals, [[Human Resources|and people]] of the world to save his family. One character mentions that he has drained entire countries dry over the years, and his current plan involves exterminating an entire race of people to gain the wakfu he needs. Of course, Grougaloragran also mentions that {{spoiler|it won't actually work, as time travel is simply impossible no matter how much wakfu he collects, and he'll probably just end up breaking the universe if he tries}}. Nox, however, is [[Moral Event Horizon|long]] [[The Unfettered|past]] [[Complete Monster|caring.]] {{spoiler|Turns out it ''is'' possible. Too bad the wakfu requirements were far steeper than Nox estimated -- the wakfu he spent centuries gathering was only enough to facilitate a ''twenty minute'' time jump.}}

** Done as a [[Shout-Out]] to ''Back to the Future'', when Peter has Death warp him back in time so he can relive a day in his teenage years. However he does so at a critical moment in the history of his relationship to Lois that ends with her married to Quagmire and him married to Molly Ringwald (its complicated, just go with it). Peter, along with Brian, convince Death to send them back to undo Peter's mistake.

** Also, explicitly referenced in an episode where Peter [[It Makes Sense in Context|becomes a Jehovah's Witness (among other things)]] and explains Jesus like this, leading to a ''[[Quantum Leap]]'' sight gag.

* Likewise, sister series ''[[American Dad]]'' had a [[Christmas Episode]] that featured a Ghost of Christmas Past trying to pull [[Yet Another Christmas Carol]] on Stan but he uses the opportunity to try and "fix" Christmas by killing Jane Fonda. His guardian angel stops him, but when they get back to modern times America is under the control of Soviet Russia. [[It Makes Sense in Context]].<ref>Stan also got [[Martin Scorcese]] off drugs, which meant no ''[[Taxi Driver]]'', which meant John Hinkley Jr. didn't try to shoot [[Ronald Reagan]], which meant Walter Mondale gets elected President and immediately surrendered to the USSR</ref> {{spoiler|In a bit of a subversion, trying to fix the original event by making ''[[Taxi Driver]]'' doesn't work, so Stan is forced to shoot Reagan himself (which much to his relief is told he just has to "wing him") to fix the timeline.}} Note that even in the end [["Close Enough" Timeline|the timeline isn't the same]]: {{spoiler|Since Stan only shot Reagan, his assistant James Brady was fine which meant no Brady Bill and thus America has less strict gun laws.}}

 

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[[Category:Plots]]