Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Difference between revisions

 

Distinguished from [[Groundhog Day Loop]] by:

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

 

* An attempt at this is the driving force behind the [[Myth Arc]] of ''[[Rave Master]]''. The series inverts the trope because changing history back to the way it was is the ''bad guys''' plan, as the original timeline's world was utterly destroyed save one survivor, who was able to change history to create the Rave world. On top of the [[Eldritch Abomination|Eldritch]] [[Clock Roaches|Clock Roach]] out to undo the paradox involved, most of the late-story baddies want to see the "false" world destroyed.

* The premise of ''[[Flint the Time Detective]]''. The Time Shifters got scattered throughout history, changing the way certain historical events played out, and the Time Detectives have to captured them and put the past back the way it was.

* {{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}}.

* [[Amakusa 1637]] is built around this trope. Six schoolers from modern Nagasaki end up thrown in the Nagasaki of 1637, few before the failed [[Japanese Christian]] rebellion of Shiro Amakusa; they decide to pull this trope to avert such tragedy.

 

 

=== Fan Works ===

* In [[Heta Oni]], {{spoiler|Italy has been rewinding time again and again so that everyone can get out of the [[Haunted House]] alive.}}

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

* The basic premise of ''[[Time Cop]]'', to fix what the baddies are doing in the past and avoid the aforementioned butterfly effect.

* In ''[[The Time Machine]]'' (2002) Alexander Hartdegen's original motive for inventing his time machine is to prevent his fiancee from dying in the park. However, the movie subverts this trope, as his every effort to save her [[Butterfly of Doom|causes her to die anyway from another cause]]. It is explained later that [[Grandfather Paradox|were it not for that tragic event, he would never have finished his invention, which would have precluded him going back and saving her.]]

* In ''[[Kamen Rider|OOO, Den-O, All Riders: Let's Go Kamen Riders]]'', history was accidentally altered thanks to a Cell Medal being left in the past during a fight. This resulted in Shocker defeating the Kamen Riders and conquering the Earth. So the plot of the movie revolves around going back in time to set it right.

* Subverted in the ''[[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".

=== Literature ===

* [[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.

* ''[[A Christmas Carol]]'' has this with the Ghost of Christmas Future warning of the deaths of both Tiny Tim and Scrooge, which Scrooge then fixes thanks to [[Scare'Em Straight]].

* In ''Mergers'' by Steven L. Layne, the titular Mergers must go back in time to make sure that a man named Michael Quinn dies as a young boy.The reason why is that {{spoiler|Senator Broogue went back in time before the Mergers were born and saved Michael from dying, thus causing the creation of a society with only one race.}} Somewhat different from the usual situation, in that usually it is the opposite(them saving the person).

* Elizabeth Haydon's ''[[Symphony of Ages]]'' is this all over.

* Thursday Next's father's intent throughout ''The Eyre Affair''. Whatever else they feel it important to talk about, her father always asks Thursday about the outcome of some major battle. His normal response is to swear and vanish (presumably to the battle he asked about), but the whole thing is [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] when he asks about one he asked about earlier in the book, and Thursday exasperatedly tells him that the answer hasn't changed since he last asked, but the actual answer she gives is different.

* ''Chronicles of Chrestomanci''

** 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.

 

=== Web Original ===

** 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.

* [[Cable]] has apparently set as his ultimate goal to set right ''everything'' that went wrong, like preventing [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast|Apocalypse]] from waking up. (He then wakes up Apocalypse himself by accident. [[Good Job Breaking It Hero|Good job]].)

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

** A [[Story Arc]] in the early 100's issues involved Knuckles' future daughter Lara-Su attempting to undo her own [[Bad Future]] by preventing her father's assassination. Unfortunately, when she got back to her time, she discovered that her mother had lied to her in order to protect her—the truth was, Knuckles hadn't died, he'd pulled a [[Face Heel Turn]] and was in fact responsible for the [[Bad Future]] they lived in. The bright side, however, is that the "present" Lara-Su had visited was the series' main timeline, while her future is an [[Alternate Universe|alternate one]]. So we don't have to worry about our Knuckles switching sides like that.

* 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.

** 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—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}}.

** Not-quite-subverted in "Genesis of the Daleks". The Time Lords send the Doctor back in time to the creation of the Daleks, with the goal of either preventing their creation, or at least making them less aggressive. While there, the Doctor is captured by the Daleks' creator and is made to detail every Dalek vulnerability he knows about. Being the universe's resident expert on fighting Daleks, this would have been a catastrophe had he not [[No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup|destroyed]] the tape before leaving the scene.

** [[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.

** Subverted in episode "Different Destinations," where the team go back in time to a historic siege and make things ''worse'' by getting everyone except them killed.

** Played straight in "Kansas" when the team accidentally goes back to Earth in 1985 and has to prevent John's father from going on the "Challenger" shuttle to prevent his death and John possibly never ending up on Moya.

* ''[[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]]''. 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.

** Another episode had an angel go back to that time to try to kill their mother before they were born. While she seemingly succeeds in killing their father, he is brought back as a vessel for Archangel Michael, who kills the angel.

* ''[[Stargate SG-1]]''

** Played straight in the Aschen arc, in the episodes "2010" and "2001". The former takes place in a [[Bad Future]], where the Aschen, posing as benevolent aliens, infect Earth with a sterility vaccine that will eventually cause its population to die out. To avert it, SG-1 sends a [[Note to Self:|note to their past selves]] back in time, leading to a less tragic future.

** Played straight in the two-parter "Moebius" when an attempt to go back in time to retrieve a piece of technology results in screwing up the timeline and having to go back in time again to fix it.

*** Not necessarily. It's not made clear if it was SG-1's interference that made Ra leave with the stargate or if that was what originally happened.

* The ''[[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]]'' 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.}}

* ''[[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).

** What the previous two events have in common is that the change prevented the [[Monster of the Week|Imagin]] from making a [[Deal with 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 the [[Non-Serial Movie]] of ''[[Kamen Rider Kiva]]'', ''King of Hell Castle'', Wataru goes back in time in order to prevent a prison inmate from discovering the ruins of an ancient demon race and becoming their king. Unfortunately, his actions don't make any real difference, and in fact may have made it worse, given that when he returns to 2008, the creatures are roaming freely and the moon is covered by a gigantic monster eyeball.

=== Tabletop Games ===

* 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.

 

 

* In ''[[Dark Cloud]] 2'' you had to restore various points in the future that were destroyed in the past by the [[Big Bad]].

* Kain's motivation during the later ''[[Legacy of Kain]]'' games is to fix the ruined world ''he himself created'' by traveling through time, although the plot is so complex and nearly every member of the cast is such a conniving manipulator that the importance of this, while not lessened, is somewhat drowned out. The rules of time travel in this setting make this goal even harder than it usually is; normally, [[You Can't Fight Fate]] and going back in time will merely cause a [[Stable Time Loop]], but real alterations can be made by ''deliberately causing a [[Temporal Paradox]]'' and then acting inside of its effect.

** In Sonic's story, he eventually ends up time-traveling to a [[Bad Future]], and discovering that it was caused by the death of Princess Elise, very shortly after the date that Sonic had just left. Sonic travels back to rescue her.

** 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—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]].

* 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.}}

 

=== Western Animation ===

* 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.

* In the '90s ''[[X-Men (animation)|X-Men]]'' animated series:

** Bishop is terrible at this though, mostly due to his trigger happy nature. His plans to just kill/destroy the source of the problem and then head back to the future never work because he doesn't unravel the conspiracies involved. Fortunately his actions let the X-Men know, and they do manage to fix things.

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

* 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.}}

* In ''[[Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures|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.

* ''[[Family Guy]]''

** 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.