Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Difference between revisions

{{quote|''"Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator -- and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to [[Trope Namer|put right what once went wrong]] and hoping each time that his next leap... will be the leap home."''|'''Opening''', ''[[Quantum Leap (TV)|Quantum Leap]]''}}

Constitutes the plot of nearly every episode of ''[[Quantum Leap (TV)|Quantum Leap]]'' ([[Trope Namer|from which this title was taken]]), ''[[Early Edition (TV)|Early Edition]]'', ''[[Seven Days]]'', and ''[[Tru Calling]]'', as well as a majority of episodes of ''[[The Dead Zone]]'', and numerous individual episodes of other shows. Can form the [[Arc]] of a whole series, as in ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]''.

#The character's knowledge of what needs to be corrected prior to the first time through, and

Combinations of [[Groundhog Day Loop]] and [['''Set Right What Once Went Wrong]]''' are possible, however, and have been used on occasion: see for example "The Siege" on ''[[The Dead Zone]]'', the ''[[Tru Calling]]'' episode "The Longest Day", ''[[Early Edition (TV)|Early Edition]]''{{'}}s "Run, Gary, Run." In fact, this combination is the entire premise of ''[[Day Break]]''.

Sometimes, trying to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]] is what [[You Already Changed the Past|sets everything wrong in the first place]], resulting in a [[Stable Time Loop]] and [[Two Rights Make a Wrong]]. Succeeding would create a [[Temporal Paradox]] (i.e. if you do manage to set right what was wrong, you would have no reason to travel back in time in the first place, which means the wrong-ness would still be there, so you'd travel back in time, etc.) When the purpose of the time travel is to save a person (but not alter the timeline) by pulling the person out of time, it's a [[Time Travel Escape]].

=== Series[[Comic PlotsBooks]] ===

* 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 (Comic Book)|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.

* The ''[[Pony POV Series (Fanfic)|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 Asas Yourself|fade away as Twilight Sparkle]] instead of becoming a monster, [[What You Are in Thethe Dark|even if no one, not even her, will ever know]].}}

=== Films -- Live-Action[[Film]] ===

* Most of the ''[[Back to Thethe Future (Filmfilm)|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.

* ''[[Cyborg 2087]]''. In the far future, a mind-control invention has been abused to create a police state controlled by cyborgs. Garth, a good guy cyborg, travels back to 1966 to convince the invention's creator to keep it secret and thus change the future.

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

* The film ''[[Frequency (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.

* The plot of the ''[[Stargate SG-1 (TV)|Stargate SG-1]]'' movie ''[[Stargate: Continuum]]'' centers around the main cast being the only people to know that the timeline has been changed and trying to convince others to let them change things back. The trope is notably deconstructed when SG-1 gets a [[What the Hell, Hero?]] speech upon suggesting time travel; the issue is raised that this trope requires an [[Omniscient Morality License]] to work and that to assume you can go around Setting Right What Once Went Wrong is an act of staggering arrogance as it necessitates changing the lives of millions... of course it always [[It Got Worse|Gets Worse]] and they're allowed to do it in the end.

* The heroine of the underrated ''Retroactive'' finds herself timelooped due to close proximity to an underground time travel experiment. She is witness to a murder, and tries to use the shortish (20-minute?) loop to alter the outcome. Results vary.

* Subverted in the ''[[Final Destination (Film)|Final Destination]]'' series. One character's foreknowledge allows him or her and a group of friends to escape some kind of fatal accident. The rest of each movie is about ''death'' trying to fix this event that "went wrong".

* The protagonist of [[Jack Chalker]]'s ''[[Downtiming the Night Side]]'' is forced to choose sides in a temporal war. Naturally, ''both'' sides claim to be battling those who would [[Make Wrong What Once Went Right]] in order to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]].

* Elizabeth Haydon's ''[[Symphony of Ages (Literature)|Symphony of Ages]]'' is this all over.

* This is one of the main plots in Roger Zelazny's ''Roadmarks'', which has a road that travels from one end of time to another with off-ramps into various alternate histories. If an off-ramp doesn't get used, it eventually vanishes. The main protagonist, Red Dorakeen keeps trying to run modern firearms to the Battle of Marathon to change the outcome, thus re-creating an off-ramp that will allow him to find his lost home. At one point he sees Hitler, traveling in a VW Bug, “trying to find the place where he won.”

* [[Isaac Asimov]]'s ''[[The End of Eternity]]'' is based on this trope. A group known as ''"Eternity''" exists outside of time, constantly intervening to maintain peace and order. However, {{spoiler|in the end, it is discovered that their constant maintaining of a peaceful world resulted, in the long run, in the extinction of humanity, and the entire Eternity program is prevented from beginning}}.

* 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.)

* Attempted in the novel ''Time Andand Again'', sequel to ''From Time to Time'' (unrelated to the ''Naruto'' [[Fanfic]] of the same name). In this universe, time travel to the past is possible for a select few with the proper training. The main character in ''Time and Again'' goes back to 1912 in an attempt to prevent World War 1. He knows that there was a man who went to Europe to negotiate an agreement that could have prevented the war, but the agreement never made it back to the US. He later finds out that this was because the man and agreement went down with the ''Titanic''. His next attempt is to prevent the ship from sinking. Another time agent alters the ship's course the ''tiniest'' bit, so that the ship will miss the iceberg by a few inches. {{spoiler|Turns out that her alteration was what caused the ship to ''hit'' the iceberg.}}

* The premise of R. J. Rummel's ''Never Again'' series of novels is the main characters [[Fix Fic|traveling back to 1906 to undo all the atrocities of the Twentieth Century and]] and [[Author Tract|to spread democracy throughout the world.]] [[Deconstruction|It gets a lot more complicated than it seems at first.]]

* Subverted in ''[[Pendragon]]'' where Bobby thinks that he setting right what once went wrong by stopping the Hindenberg's destruction, but if he had stopped it, he would have doomed the entire world.

* This was also the plot for the entire ''[[Voyagers!]]!'' series where Phineas and Jeffrey would travel through time to "give history a little nudge".

* ''[[Odyssey 5]]'', where a [[Five-Man Band]] witnesses the destruction of Earth from a space shuttle and are sent back in time five years by [[Sufficiently Advanced Aliens]] to prevent it. Although they promise not to change events, each of them can't resist meddling with their past to make it better. For instance one woman who knows her son will die of cancer starts giving him a potentially dangerous preventative drug -- herdrug—her husband, convinced she's going insane, cuts off her access to the boy. Another character bets on a football game -- thegame—the size of his bet leads to other people betting on the outcome, starting rumors that adversely affect the course of the game. Worse, the group have consider the possibility that their own actions might advance in time, or even cause, the destruction of Earth.

* The main plot of the first three seasons of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'', though this is more of a case of [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong|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 (TV)|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.}}

* ''[[Angel (TV)|Angel]]''{{'}]s [[Crossover]] with ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)|Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'', "I Will Remember You."

=== [[Music]] ===

* Basically the whole premise of ''[[Daikatana (Video Game)|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.

* The plot of ''[[Marathon (Video Game)Trilogy|Marathon Infinity]] Infinity'' in the round-about way.

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

** The whole point of the ''Wings of the Goddess'' expansion in ''[[Final Fantasy XI (Video Game)|Final Fantasy XI]]''. {{spoiler|In fact, the player's version of Vana'diel was revealed to be the [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]] outcome of the nine Cait Siths nudging the Crystal War into a better direction, until people from the other timeline decided to set wrong what once went right. Leads one to wonder how long the [[Never Live It Down|Pandemonium Warden fight]] took in the "bad" version of the universe.}}

** The point of ''[[Final Fantasy XIII (Video Game)|Final Fantasy XIII]]-2'' is to fix the timeline and help everyone find happiness while averting future disaster. {{spoiler|They fail, and cause a massive [[Time Crash]].}}

* The overarching plot of the popular ''[[Half-Life (Video Gameseries)|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}}.

* Implied in-game and [[Wild Mass Guessing|inferred by fans]] in regards to ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time]]'', and also one of the cornerstones of [[Continuity Snarl|the infamous Split-Timeline Theory]]. The whole game deals with Link's efforts kick Ganondorf off the usurped throne of Hyrule ([[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|which Link was sort of responsible for in the first place]]), which he succeeds at with the help of Zelda and the sages. Then Zelda sends Link back to before all that happened so Link can experience the childhood he was robbed off. Link therefore uses this opportunity to warn Zelda and everyone else of how Ganondorf was planning to steal the Triforce, which leads to Ganondorf being captured and executed. However, {{spoiler|this sets up the plot for ''[[Twilight Princess]]'', where Ganondorf survives said execution and is trapped in the Twilight Realm, where he gives Zant the power to usurp the throne of the Twili}}. So things were set right, but they ended up going wrong in a different way.

* ''[[Radiant Historia (Video Game)|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.

* Pretty much the point of ''[[TimeshiftTimeShift]]''. The [[Big Bad]] gets the suit that lets him time-travel at will and reshapes the world to his own ideals, so the Hero has to get the toned-down suit and go back after him in order to try to fix things.

=== Visual[[Web NovelsOriginal]] ===

* This sets the events of ''[[Megas XLR (Animation)|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[[Comic or Character PlotsBooks]] ===

=== Films -- Live-Action[[Literature]] ===

* 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 -- shelie—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 -- andvisited—and she ends up using it to trick another supervillain into saving the world.

* In the ''[[Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Franchisenovel)/|Harry Potter and Thethe Prisoner of Azkaban|third Harry Potter book]]'', Harry and Hermione have the chance to go back and save two innocent lives.

** Officially this can't work in the Whoniverse (the series 1 episode "Father's Day" shows why) but Amy gets a chance to do it in a small way in the series 5 finale -- notfinale—not by time travelling, but because {{spoiler|the universe is being rebooted from her memories, so if she remembers something the way it was, she can have it back}}.

** Possibly subverted in "Resurrection of the Daleks", where the Daleks used the Doctor's interference in their creation to justify an attack on Gallifrey.

** [[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 ''[[Babylon 5]]'', this is a key point in the 5 five-year plot -- insteadplot—instead of "Sometimes, trying to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]] is what [[You Already Changed the Past|sets everything wrong in the first place]], resulting in a [[Stable Time Loop]].", everything will go wrong unless the heroes go back to keep what's right, creating a [[Stable Time Loop]] by altering the past to what it is. Which gets really confusing if you try to ask, "What happened the first time?". There are a few hints via dreams and a broadcast. It's said the Shadow's army would have been three times larger and more prone to act directly earlier.

* More of a case of "Set right what we messed up" but in an episode of ''[[Hannah Montana (TV)|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]].

* Done in ''[[Power Rangers Turbo]]'', with heavily debated success. A robot, the Blue Senturion, came from a thousand years in the future to warn the herosheroes about a war two years later... and was intercepted by the villains, who took the message, and deleted it from his memory. Not only did the war still happen, but it happened a year earlier than scheduled. On the one hand, an all-out win for Team Evil was averted, but on the other, [[Power Rangers in Space|it still didn't]] [[Heroic Sacrifice|end very]] [[Bittersweet Ending|happily]].

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

* ''[[Farscape (TV)|Farscape]]''

* Guinan of ''[[Star Trek: the Next Generation (TV)|Star Trek theThe Next Generation]]'' is practically this trope walking personified (as for reasons that were never even hinted at until [[The Movie]], changes in the timeline do not affect her), especially in "Yesterday's Enterprise". More technically they don't entirely affect her. She could identify something was wrong, but didn't know what could have caused it.

* ''[[The Outer Limits (TV)|The Outer Limits]]'' TOS episode "The Man Who Was Never Born". A mutant from a devastated future goes back in time to prevent the biological disaster that destroyed civilization.

* In modern series of ''[[The Outer Limits (TV)|The Outer Limits]]''. A scientist develops a time machine and uses it to go back and kill serial killers before their first murder. However, it turns out she was motivated by the fact that she'd been raped and tortured by a serial killer herself as a child. She eventually goes back and kills ''him'', thus saving her younger self, but this undoes all of her other killings.

* ''[[Supernatural (TV series)|Supernatural]]'' has an episode that Dean ''thinks'' is a [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]], but not only does it turn out he was only meant to ''Witness'' What Went Wrong and not change it, it sure looks like he actually ''caused'' it.

* ''[[Stargate SG-1 (TV)|Stargate SG-1]]''

** Subverted in "The Gamekeeper": Jack and Daniel ''think'' that they're being sent to the past to fix mistakes in their lives, but it turns out that they're just mentally reliving them, not really time travelling, and there's no way for them to fix it anyways.

** Also played straight in the movie ''Continuum'' as listed in the "Films" section.

* The ''[[Stargate Atlantis (TV)|Stargate Atlantis]]'' episode "The Last Man" has Sheppard thrown 48,000 years into the future, where a program Rodney left behind recounts a long [[It Got Worse]] story of the intervening years and arranges to send Sheppard back to fix everything. He even gives Sheppard some crucial information, like Teyla's location at the time, so Sheppard can change what happened for the better.

* ''[[The X-Files (TV)|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 -- becausetime—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 Once Went Wrong|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 (TV)|Star Trek: Voyager]]'' "Year of Hell" serial. Or for that matter, the conclusion to the series altogether.

* In an episode of ''[[The Flash (TV 1990)|The Flash]]'', Barry Allen is accidentally thrust 10ten years into a future where Central City has been taken over by his brother's killer, Nicholas Pike, and where an underground group of citizens were waiting for [[Second Coming|the Flash to return]] in order to set things right.

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

** Although it seems perfectly okay for them to change history in some cases but not in others. In one early episode, our heroes help a struggling musician make it to a gig which he had missed in the original timeline. He's convinced that had he not missed this gig, he'd be a star in the present. Turns out he's still a nobody even after they change history; the only difference is that he no longer blames himself for the breakup of his band. Since the change was so unimportant, our heroes are informed that what they did was okay.

** What the previous two events have in common is that the change prevented the [[Monster of the Week|Imagin]] from making a [[Deal Withwith the Devil]] with that person in the first place. While Singularity Points negate ''some'' of the damage caused by an Imagin to the past, they only negate damage to things that were part of their memory and some things are lost for good. So completely negating the rampage ''better'' preserves the timeline than simply destroying the Imagin in the past, even if it requires a minor change. Strangely, this ''doesn't'' negate the fact the Imagin was destroyed though...

* In ''[[Primeval]]'', Matt spends the majority of season four and five doing this to prevent a [[Bad Future|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 (TV)|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.

=== Web[[Tabletop AnimationGames]] ===

** In Silver's story, Silver is a native of the aforementioned bad future; he travels to the past (i.e. Sonic's time) intending to kill the "Iblis trigger" and prevent Armageddon. However, he thought that ''Sonic'' was the Iblis trigger--becausetrigger—because Silver's source of information about the past was manipulating him into [[Make Wrong What Once Went Right|Making Wrong What Once Went Right]].

** In ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time]]''{{'}}s ending, Zelda sends Link back to the beginning of the game so he can avoid his [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero]] moment. Rather than changing the future they're in, it creates a second time line. The timeline where Link sealed Ganon away now lacks a hero to take care of him, and the gods end up ''destroying hyruleHyrule in a Great Flood'' for lack of any other option. And the other timeline, where Link didn't lead Ganondorf directly to the triforceTriforce? Ganondorf ends up with 1/3 of it and gets sealed away ''anyway''. Net result of attempt to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]]: one timeline in exactly the same situation that they were trying to prevent, and one timeline ''utterly destroyed''.

** ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda MajorasMajora's Mask]]'' begins with Link dumped into an alternate reality, [[Baleful Polymorph|unwillingly transformed into a harmless Deku Scrub]], and forced to watch helplessly as the world around him goes to hell in a handbasket before its eventual destruction at the end of the third day. Then Link goes back in time, regains his true form, and relives the same three days [[Groundhog Day Loop|over and over]] as he gradually meets and helps everyone the [[Big Bad]] has hurt, until he is finally strong enough to stop it all from happening.

* The entire plot of ''[[Mortal Kombat 9 (Video Game)|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 Thethe Future (Filmfilm)|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}}.

* ''[[Myst (Video Gameseries)|Riven]]'' has a non-time-travel variant as the framing device. The linking books the series relies on can be used to modify worlds they link to using quantum uncertainty; if it ''could'' have been there but was never noticed before, writing in that it ''is'' there will make it happen. Unfortunately, Gehn, who wrote quite a number of linking books, was not actually very good at writing them, so the same quantum-uncertainty mechanics are causing the Ages he wrote to deteriorate of their own accord. His son, Atrus, is much better at writing them, and thinks he can save some of them using these same quantum-uncertainty mechanics, but some are beyond salvaging. Your task is to go into one of the doomed ones to rescue Atrus' wife while he stays and tries to stall its destruction for as long as possible.

* Done as part of a ''[[Terminator (Filmfranchise)|Terminator]]'' homage in ''[[Sluggy Freelance (Webcomic)|Sluggy Freelance]]'' when Berk arrives from the future to stop K'Z'K from conquering the world.

* [[Bad Future]] {{spoiler|Dave Strider}} in ''[[Homestuck (Webcomic)|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.

* ''[[Bug (Webcomic)Martini|Bug]]'' shows us that if you attempt to set right what was once wrong, [https://web.archive.org/web/20130516092215/http://www.bugcomic.com/comics/crummy-gift/ you risk doing just the opposite.] You can also use this trope [https://web.archive.org/web/20130514063524/http://www.bugcomic.com/comics/breaking-up/ to end a relationship.]

* Yehuda's motivation for working as a bike mechanic in ''[[Yehuda Moon and The Kick StandKickstand 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 (Webcomic)|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.}}

* ''[[Back to The Future (Animationcartoon)|Back to The Future]]''

* ''[[Danny Phantom (Animation)|Danny Phantom]]'' promises not to allow his evil future to come to pass after seeing himself as a sadistic, mass-murdering sociopath. Although Clockwork helps, the subversion comes when it's hinted at the end that it may just be a matter of time after all, if with different circumstances.

* 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 (Animation)|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 (Animation)|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 Byby 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.}}

* In ''[[The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest: (Animation)|The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest]]'' episode "The Edge of Yesterday," we learn that Dr. Quest created a time machine program in [[Cyberspace|Questworld]] after his wife died, which would allow him to travel back in time and see his wife again. When he finished it, he realized he wouldn't only be able to ''see'' his wife, he could also change the past to prevent her from dying. His ethics would not let him alter history for personal gain, so he sealed the program so it couldn't be used. Later on, Jonny and Jessie use the program to go back in time and prevent Ezekiel Rage from planting a bomb that could cause the tectonic plates to split, destroying the Earth.

* Two episodes of ''[[Lilo and& Stitch: The Series]]'' centered around this plot. In the first, Lilo embarrasses herself in front of her love interest. She find out Jumba has a surfboard style time machine and used it to fix the blunder, but at the same time theresthere's an experiment running around that Stitch tries to catch and each attempt causes a disaster to the area causing multiple re-dos. Eventually Lilo has to let herself get embarrassed to fix the timeline. The second involves Lilo finding an experiment that can warp time forward, allowing her to age into a teenager and later an adult. However since she and Stitch are time traveling, they're not around to catch experiments. Allowing [[Big Bad]] Gantu and Hamsterveil to capture them and take over the Earth. Conveniently said experiment has a [[Reset Button]] but they have to rescue it first to fix the damage.

* ''[[Family Guy (Animation)|Family Guy]]'':

** 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 (TV)|Quantum Leap]]'' sight gag.

** And now{{when}} Stewie and Brian are credited as using this to CREATE''create THEthe FAMILY''Family GUYGuy'' UNIVERSEuniverse. LITERALLY Literally.'' So that's a... set half-right what was elsetime random-in-the-void? It gets played straight in the same episode when Stewie's sperm-brother tries to erase one of his more 'European' ancestors to erase Stewie.

* Likewise, sister series ''[[American Dad (Animation)|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.}}