The Slow Path: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

A mild tragedy for a time traveler, particularly applicable to the longer-lived variety.

 

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Dinosaur King]]'', Rex uses the time machine to go home to the future. Suddenly, the ship comes back. Zoe and Max wonder if he stopped his journey or was gone for a long time just to return to the day he left.

* ''[[Martian Successor Nadesico]]'': {{spoiler|A jump back several years is how Ai grows up to be Inez Fressange.}}

* In the manga of ''[[Sailor Moon]]'', Sailor Pluto dies in the "future" to save Chibiusa. She reveals herself to Chibiusa in the next arc in the present day, having explained she was reincarnated ''backwards in time'' to a point before Sailor Moon's adventures began. She laid low until after the Senshi went forward in time, saw her death, and returned. This also explains how the Time Gate still has a Guardian while Setsuna is with the rest of the Senshi. Presumably she'll wait until her previous self dies and then take over her old duties at the Time Gate. The [[Anime]] of ''[[Sailor Moon]]'' does something different.

* During the second season of ''[[GaoGaiGar]]'', ChoRyuJin pushes a massive asteroid back through a portal, and is believed lost. A few <s>days</s> episodes later, Mamoru's class takes a field trip to look for ancient fossils, and to their great surprise, digs him up. It turned out that he ended up millions of years in the past; {{spoiler|the asteroid [[Phlebotinum Killed the Dinosaurs|caused the dinosaurs to go extinct]].}}

** After Mikuru lost her time-machine while a trip to the past with Kyon, Yuki time-freezes them sleeping in her guest-bedroom, so they wouldn't age while the time was passing by.

** During the repeating summer vacation, {{spoiler|Nagato reveals that she}} remembers every loop, accounting for something like 595 years.

* The ending of ''[[The Girl Who Leapt Through Time]]'' has {{spoiler|Chiaki}} return to his time in the future, promising to wait for Matoko, who can no longer time-travel. "I'll be right there. I'll run there."

* In ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro ni]]'', {{spoiler|Furude Rika}} mentions "we were getting tired of waiting" when Keiichi moves to Hinamizawa. You'd be tired of waiting too, if you had spent a hundred years in a (sort of) [[Groundhog Day Loop]].

* The "left behind" version happens to Mai and Mea in ''[[Popotan]]'', for a five year period. Mai gets to enjoy going to school and having friends.

* An example in reverse order found in one of [[Crossbone Gundam|Yuichi Hasegawa]]'s short manga. A boy "traveled" from ancient Greek using a cold sleep capsule. His intention is to enjoy the future a little then travel back to his time with his already-available time machine, which cannot go to the future since "the future does not yet exist." {{spoiler|The boy is actually [[Greek Mythology|Perseus]] - sent to the present by [[Beethoven Was an Alien Spy|Zeus (who is actually a genius inventor)]]. [[Write Back to the Future|His adventure in the story is eventually passed down as the legend of Perseus.]]}}

 

* In [[Neil Gaiman]]'s original ''[[Books of Magic]]'' miniseries, the [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]] Mr. E takes the protagonist to the end of time, so he can kill him without interference. [[The Grim Reaper|Death]] stops him, and forces him to take The Slow Path ''back''—with the implication that he will create a [[Stable Time Loop]] by teaching his younger self to time-walk.

* In [[The DCU]] [[Crisis Crossover]] ''[[DC One Million]]'', various Justice League members exchange places with their [[Legacy Character|successors]] in the 853rd century. The [[Martian Manhunter]] and the Resurrection Man are already there. (As is Vandal Savage, who keeps coming up in this trope).

* In the ''Deadpool/GLI Summer Fun Special'', [[Squirrel Girl]] gets lost in time travel and ends up in 2099, with a version of her boyfriend who avoided becoming [[Darker and Edgier]] (literally). She decides it's not so bad, until fellow [[Great Lakes Avengers|Great Lakes Initiative]] member Mr Immortal shows up to tell her how the present's going. She wonders how he traveled there, then remembers how. For those who don't know, Mr Immortal's power is [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]].

* Bishop of the [[X-Men]] was stuck in the past during the team's mission to stop Legion. He therefore lived through the years as the ''Age of Apocalypse'' storyline unfolded until its "present day." While the entire AoA timeline was wiped out at the end of the event, Bishop's memories of his life there were inherited by his mainstream continuity self. Somehow.

* In the ''[[Thorgal]]'' story Master of the Mountains, a time warping ring is used to deposit two characters in the past. One uses the ring to get back, the other has to take The Slow Path. {{spoiler|This is done twice, once by a would-be [[Chessmaster]] in a ploy to end up with power ''and'' the girl, and once by the girl to counter the [[Chessmaster]]'s ploy and kill him.}}

* [[Alan Moore]] wrote a few comics for the [[Star Wars Expanded Universe]]. One of them is "Tiltony Throws a Shape", in which Leia, forced to land on a barren world and pursued by stormtroopers, comes across some ungodly ancient powerful beings. One kills Leia and the stormtroopers, and another resurrects them - Leia just fine where and when she was, letting her escape... the stormtroopers [http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/Marsh8472/starwars_timetravel.jpg eight thousand years in the past]. Leia comes across their dessicated bones, near where the ship landed long after their deaths.

 

* ''[[Doctor Who]]'': There's actually a pretty good [[Doctor Who/Fanfic Recs|fanfic]] set in an alternate universe in which the Doctor takes the slow path with Reinette: [http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=7495 The Slow Path, or Two and a Half Centuries in Two and a Half Days].

* Kyon has to take The Slow Path for an evening in ''[[Kyon: Big Damn Hero]]'', at one point.

** Later, he travels several days back in time and [[Retroactive Preparation|spends them to develop a plan]] to rescue {{spoiler|Sasaki}}.

* ''[http://www.mediaminer.org/fanfic/view_st.php/54993 The Lucky Ones]'' has the Bone-Eaters' Well shut down and Kagome become immortal in the process of destroying the Shikon Jewel, leaving her and [[Inuyasha]] to live out the five hundred years between then and her home.

 

** How this is done considering [[San Dimas Time]] is not explained

*** [[Fridge Brilliance|They wrote down what time it was when they were leaving, and set the time machine to one and a half years before they left at that exact moment of the day.]] Possibly as a response to all the people going "Why didn't they do that in the first movie?"

* In ''(T)raumschiff Surprise: Periode 1'', the character Spucky ends up taking the slow path after the time traveling couch the heroes travel on needs to lose weight. Spucky's Galapagos Turtle DNA (as well as some "not cheap" treatments) keep him looking exactly the same when the heroes arrive back in the future. Spucky does make the most of the time to glam up the earth, however.

* The movie ''[[Primer]]'' is about a box that lets you take the slow path backwards: if you want to travel back in time six hours, you have to spend six hours inside the box. On top of that, leaving the box early has some deadly side effects. The box also works forwards, but that's not quite as useful.

* At the end of ''[[Frequency]]'', after an entire film of [[Write Back to the Future]], {{spoiler|Frank takes The Slow Path to rescue John from the Nightingale Killer}}.

* In ''[[Kamen Rider OOO|OOO]], [[Kamen Rider Den-O|Den-O]], All Riders: Let's Go Kamen Rider'', one of two [[Street Urchin]]s who end up traveling 40 years into the past finds himself stuck there, . {{spoiler|in the end, he turns out not only to have been instrumental to helping the Kamen Riders make their [[Bad Future]] better, he also happens to be [[Luke, I Am Your Father|his best friend's]] [[Disappeared Dad]].}}

 

* In Brian Caswell's novel ''Dreamslip'', the two main characters can stay indefinitely in whatever time they visit, returning to the present at the exact moment they left and not being a minute older. If they ''die'' in another time, however...

* In Terry Pratchett's ''[[Johnny and The Bomb]]'', the hero and his friends travel back to World War II, {{spoiler|then one of them ends up returning to the present via The Slow Path because of a Grandfather Paradox, after which he seeks out the hero in the present, having spent the intervening half-century using his knowledge of fast food (!) and future events to become the world's richest man.}}

{{quote|'''Marvin''': The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. [[It Got Worse|After that I went into a bit of a decline]].}}

** Interestingly, 576 billion years is only 37 times the age of the universe under old estimates of the age of the universe (around 15 billion years). Under more recent estimates of the age of the universe (around 13.7 billion), Marvin turns out to be around [[42]] times the age of the universe.

* In the short story "I Borrow Dave's Time Machine" by S. N. Dyer, the protagonist goes back in time and commissions several new works of art from various old masters—then leaves them hidden in the past and retrieves them when he returns to the present. Had he just brought them back with him, they would have been dismissed as fakes because the paint would have been fresh.

** He is, effectively. He missed out on ten years of human development and [[The Sixties|social upheaval]] languishing in a jail cell. He may have taken the slow path, of one year per year time dilation, but he still effectively jumped, culturally speaking, from 1963 to 1973.

* The protagonists of ''Rainbow Mars'' by [[Larry Niven]] travel back in time hundreds of years using [[Our Time Travel Is Different|instantaneous time travel]] but lose access to it for the return trip. Instead, they use a stasis device on [[It's a Long Story|their rocket ship]] to return to their own time, popping into reality here and there to inadvertently spawn ancient legends, including that of [[Russian Mythology and Tales|Baba Yaga]].

* In a variant, the golem Anghammarad from ''[[Discworld/Going Postal|Going Postal]]'' plans to wait for the cycle of history to repeat itself, at which point it'll deliver a message it'd failed to deliver many thousands of years ago.

** It makes perfect sense to Anghammarad. As a golem, as long as he gets repaired occasionally he could last until the end of time, and the subsequent re-beginning.

* Apparently, this is what happened to {{spoiler|Aunt Grace}} of ''[[In the Keep of Time]]'' after she fell asleep in the Tower as a child and was so difficult to rouse "because the people wanted her to stay." She lost the memories of her life before then, because that part of her stayed behind to grow up and become Vianah. One can hope the same thing happened to the part of Ollie that was Mae, so that Muckle-mooth Meg [[What the Hell, Hero?|didn't have her only child taken from her by the Elliots]].

* In Robert Wilson's ''[[Spin]],'' the Earth has been trapped in ''fast'' time. Our near-future heroes decide to use slow time to find a solution, by sending a colony ship to Mars, outside the time-effect. A week after launch, the distant descendants of the colonists return to Earth...

* The Time Turners in ''[[Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban]]'' are only ever used in the story to take people ''back'' in time - first Hermione so she can take multiple classes simultaneously all year, then Hermione and Harry to rescue Buckbeak and Sirius. In all cases, they took the slow path back to the present (although it was only a matter of hours in each case).

* In [[Harry Harrison]]'s ''The Technicolor Time Machine'', the plot follows a film crew who use a [[Mad Scientist]]'s time machine to film a movie about [[Horny Vikings|Vikings]] for cheap. They use The Slow Path approach several times, such as leaving a script writer on an uninhabited island in the past for several months (his time), which for them took several seconds. They also end up sending a Viking named Ottar to Vinland by ship in order to film him getting there, while all they have to do is use the time machine. They also end up accidentally leaving their star actress behind when jumping forward by a year. They find her again as Ottar's wife and the mother of his child.

* In [[Joe Haldeman]]'s ''[[The Forever War]]'', Marygay Potter knows Bill Mandella won't be back from his last mission for centuries (if ever). She uses a relativistic spaceship to speed down the Slow Path.

* While other characters in ''[[Manifold Space]]'' travel into the far future through relativistic effects, Nemoto persists in real time through combination of advanced medical treatments and sheer force of will, building up influence and manipulating humanity from the shadows.

* Ian Watson's 1979 short story ''The Very Slow Time Machine'' is, as the title suggests, very much an example of this trope, featuring a time-traveller who appears to be travelling backwards into the past at the rate of one hour per hour.

 

* ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'': "Time's Arrow"—Data's head spends several hundred years in a cave in California. In a classic [[Stable Time Loop]], it's the discovery of his head that bootstraps the adventure.

** Ben takes it better because all that he experiences is a little disorientation then a few moments back with his son. About half an hour at most goes by for him, while Jake spends a lifetime with the knowledge that his father is trapped in the space between time. Eventually he realizes that his father, who keeps returning to ''him'', not the source of the accident, is linked with him and as soon as he dies, his father will slingshot back to the time of the accident and time will take a different path, one in which Ben didn't get lost in time but can remember it anyway. For some reason he decides that instead of simply dying of old age in his retirement, he will poison himself so that the last thing his father sees before getting sent back will be his son dying, having killed himself for Ben.

*** This is handwaved with the explanation that unless both Siskos are together when Jake kicks, Ben will be trapped in subspace forever.

** In another ''Deep Space Nine'' episode, Molly O'Brien gets stranded on an uninhabited planet about a decade in the past, with no way of retrieving her but to go fetch her in the present. {{spoiler|Eventually, they recreate the accident and send the older version through where she meets the younger version and sends her back before the anomaly closes, so she winds up absent for a few days but being gone for only a few seconds from her perspective.}}

* ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'': "Unending"—SG-1 is trapped within a time-stop field on the ''Odyssey'' for fifty years. When they finally work out a solution, Teal'c volunteers to be excluded from the time-reversal effect, so that he can deliver a plan to save the ship. Fortunately, as a Jaffa, his lifespan is [[We Are as Mayflies|exceptionally long]], though he is still visibly older by the end of it.

** Earlier in the show, season eight's finale "Moebius," a Zero Point Module takes the slow path from Ancient Egypt, due to some monkeying with the [[Timey-Wimey Ball]] by the team. That ZPM ends up in Atlantis's season 2 premiere.

** {{spoiler|Kensei/Adam also experiences this as it seems his healing ability allowed him the immortality to wait hundreds of years for his revenge on Hiro.}}

** "Bloodlines" (from the webcomic tie-in) reveals that {{spoiler|Arnold, elderly the time-traveler from the Sullivan Bros Carnival, was actually 15 years younger than Samuel. Then on a mission back to 1961, he got [[Easy Amnesia]] and ended up taking The Slow Path back to the present.}}

* In an episode of ''[[Terminator]]: [[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'', a terminator is sent back in time to stockpile raw materials for terminator manufacturing. It does so by stealing a large amount of coltan and storing it in the fallout shelter of an abandoned military base that will be turned into a factory by Skynet. It then goes into standby mode, presumably to wait until Skynet builds the factory and discovers it.

** Cromartie, the most persistent of the enemy Terminators in the series, ended up undergoing an unusual variant of this in the pilot episode. While his head gets transplanted from 1999 to 2007 along with the heroes, his body remains behind. They later recombine, so like Data, just one part of the body takes the slow path.

** Though the neat thing is, {{spoiler|the people who got off the island take three years to make it back, so that by the time everyone meets up again, they've all experienced the same amount of time.}}

** Locke meets a young Charles Widmore on the island in 1954, then again in Tunisia in 2005. Widmore introduces himself, tells Locke that they met 50 years ago and asks how long it's been for him. "Four days".

* ''[[Sanctuary]]'': Helen Magnus {{spoiler|goes back in time 113 years to kill Adam Worth. Since she has no way to get back home again, she hides out for the next hundred and thirteen years, and uses the time to plan what she wants to do to deal with the crisis that was happening when she left}}. Will is distinctly unamused when she goes missing for what seems to him to be hours, only for her to show up {{spoiler|in her ''bedroom at the Sanctuary'' and inform him that it had been more like a hundred and thirteen years}}.

* When the others are blasted into the future in ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'', Marvin has to take the slow path and wait billions of years to meet up with them. He spends the last several thousand years parking cars at the site where the Restaurant At the End of the Universe was eventually built.

* ''[[Doctor Who]]'', the [[Trope Namer]], does this so often, it practically justifies a category of its own. Aw screw it:

 

* ''[[Doctor Who]]'' has played with this quite a bit in the [[Expanded Universe]]:

** After the BBC [[Eighth Doctor Adventures]] book "The Ancestor Cell," the Doctor is dropped off around 1900, and then picked up by his companion around 2000, almost instantly for the companion. Several books are actually set in the intervening period for the Doctor.

** Later retellings of "Planet of The Spiders" in the [[Virgin New Adventures]] claim that the third Doctor actually spent ten years in agony on the floor of the TARDIS before returning to UNIT to regenerate.

** In "The Crystal Bucephalus," the fifth Doctor spends three years as a restaurateur after being abandoned on a random planet in a different era (he's looking to get picked up by time-traveling restaurant critics from the titular time-traveling restaurant).

** In the [[Big Finish]] audio "The Kingmaker," Peri and Erimem, having been ditched thanks to a navigational error, have to spend two years with Richard III while waiting for the Doctor to arrive.

** In the animated story "The Infinite Quest," the Doctor spends three years on a prison planet raising a robot bird before he arrives just in time to rescue Martha, who took the TARDIS.

* Classic ''[[Doctor Who]]'' did this rarely on-screen, but it's become more common in the revived (2005-) series:

** In "The Invasion," the Brigadier has lived through four years of normal Earth-time while the Doctor and Jamie only spent a few weeks.

*** Which itself was a reference to the quotation at the beginning of this article, in which the titular character is reiterating an explanation given to her for why years of her life pass where only minutes or hours have passed for the Doctor.

** And let's not even get started on Captain Jack Harkness, who has already had to live through more than a century after arriving in 1869 to get to the 2000s, the setting of ''[[Torchwood]]'' and the third series of ''Doctor Who'', in the hopes of seeing the Doctor again.

** This also happens to Jackie and Mickey a mere four episodes into the new series. The 9th Doctor intends to bring her home 12 ''hours'' after she left and accidentally returns Rose 12 ''months'' later. Everyone who had to live through that year the long way thought she had been kidnapped or killed. Needless to say, no one involved was happy about the results.

** In the 2010 Christmas special "[[Yet Another Christmas Carol|A Christmas Carol]]," the Doctor attempts to change the ways of a cold-hearted tyrant Kazran(in order to convince him to help save a crashing starliner where Amy and Rory were honeymooning) by visiting Kazran as a child. During their first visit, they encountered Abigail, a beautiful woman who was forced to live in suspended animation to avoid dying of a mysterious disease. Over the next few years, the Doctor would visit Kazran every Christmas Eve, and they would bring Abigail out of her cold sleep to celebrate the holiday with them. So while the Doctor time-traveled from one Christmas Eve to the next and Abigail slept from one Christmas Eve to the next, Kazran ended up taking the slower path.

*** And used to set up the romantic relationship between {{spoiler|Kazran and Abigail}}. The first two Christmas Eves, Kazran is played by Laurence Belcher (fourteen at the time of filming, but looked rather younger). Then, on the third Christmas Eve he's played by Danny Horn (twenty-one years old at the time). One of the first things Abigail says to him is "You've grown."

* In the ''[[Torchwood]]'' episode "Exit Wounds", Jack spends eighteen and a half centuries buried alive/dead/alive again below what becomes Cardiff.

 

* {{spoiler|Draco Malfoy}} goes through this at the end of ''[[A Very Potter Musical|A Very Potter Sequel]]''.

 

* ''[[Chrono Trigger]]'': One of the sidequests involves restoring a forest from what was once a barren desert. Since the process would take hundreds of years, the group's [[Robot Buddy]] stays behind to work while they time travel into the future, to pick him up. From this point on, on the overworld map, you will see an image of him working on the fields every time you go back to the medieval era, even if Robo is back in your party, because you're using the future Robo instead. But that's a [[Temporal Paradox]] for another day.

** An even more dramatic example in another side quest involves a solar-powered artifact that needs millions of years of sunlight to recharge. Needless to say, with a time machine, you can actually make use of it - the party drops it off in a cave in the year 65,000,000 B.C. and returns for it in 2300 A.D. (taking a few detours along the way to stop a selfish jerk from stealing it).

* ''[[Dark Cloud|Dark Chronicle]]'' depends heavily on people taking The Slow Path from the Present to 100 years into the future. As you create villages and populate them with people from the starting city, these villages have become high-tech laboratories, temples, great forests, or industrial sites by the time you return to Monica's time.

** However, a much more explicit case is with the Elder Tree Jurak and the Sage Crest. The former starts out as some tree saplings, and becomes a monumental tree. Crest is actually {{spoiler|a very young girl}} that Max and Monica meet during the present, but which becomes the greatest Sage in the world (and, although 100 years passed for Crest, the Sage still remembers Max and Monica, for whom there was a difference of only a few minutes).

** Interestingly, he goes back talking in [[Hulk Speak]] but comes back as eloquent and intelligent.

** This is because Asgard is programmed with a learning AI. The more he experiences (fighting experience in particular), the more intelligent he becomes.

* ''[[Day of the Tentacle]]''. Objects can frequently be flushed through time directly and immediately by Chron-O-John, but living organic matter needs an alternate transport; thus, a hamster travels the slow path as a [[Human Popsicle|Hamster Popsicle]]. Some objects can change form with slow pathing, too - a bottle of wine left in a time capsule for four hundred years isn't going to be much like wine by the time it reaches the other end, and a sweater left in a tumble dryer fed with a mountain of quarters will have somewhat dramatically shrunk.

* {{spoiler|Dr Diggins}} takes this route in ''[[Fossil Fighters]]'' after [[spoiler: being sent back to the Jurassic era. Fortunately, he finds a crashed dinaurian starship and uses the stone sleep process to wait out the 150 million years until he gets revived.

* In ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (2006 video game)||Sonic the Hedgehog 2006]]'', E-123 Omega takes a Chaos Emerald and enters standby mode [[Big Damn Heroes|to help Shadow]] when he was trapped in the future.

 

* In ''[[Red vs. Blue]]'', Church gets sent back over a thousand years by an explosion that destroys the present. He asks the nearby AI to build him a teleporter or time machine (or both). It'll take about 1,000 years. Church stands there, and basically does three things: grow a beard ([[Rule of Funny|somehow]]), formulate a plan to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]], and listen to awful knock-knock jokes. Keep in mind that, by this point in the story, Church is a ghost {{spoiler|(really an AI)}} inhabiting a robot body, so he's effectively immortal.

 

* In ''[[Bob and George]]'', the titular George is sent back several months in a time suit to fix some plot holes in the previous storylines. He does so, but the suit breaks, so he spends the time until time catches up with him on the beach in Acapulco.

* In ''[[Two Evil Scientists]]'', Mega Man is sent back to the [[Sonic the Hedgehog|Space Colony ARK]] fifty years in the past, and ends up waiting 100+ years to the time of [[Mega Man X]].

* In ''[[Wapsi Square]]'', {{spoiler|Shelly spends roughly 80,000 years trapped in an alternate dimension where time flows differently.}}

 

* The ''[[Trinton Chronicles]]'' has Dan, who froze himself in time after a big battle, waiting until 'someone' rescued him from the temporal hibernation. It took roughly 80+ years before it happened too.

 

* ''[[Futurama]]''

** In "Roswell That Ends Well", a direct parody of the ''TNG'' episode occurs: Bender's head is dropped in the New Mexico desert in the 1940s, and has to be recovered ''a thousand years later''. Not only does Bender not mind being buried in the dirt for a millennium, he actually complains upon being rescued that his peace and quiet are being disturbed.

** Another episode uses it on a smaller scale, almost as a throwaway gag. [[Evil Genius|Evil]] [[Teen Genius|Teen]] [[Genius Ditz]] Jack Spicer uses the Sands of Time to disappear into the future—then returns a few seconds later in a Hawaiian shirt (but otherwise unchanged), explaining that he took a year off to come up with an [[Evil Plan]].

* In the ''[[Justice League]]'' episode "The Savage Time", the League travels back to World War II in order to stop Vandal Savage from conquering the world, and Wonder Woman fights alongside special agent Steve Trevor while there. Once the League returns to their own time, Wonder Woman encounters Trevor again—this time as an old man, in a retirement home.

** In another episode, "Hereafter," Superman is teleported several thousand years into the future, where he finds... Vandal Savage, who has spent the entire time on Earth alone, living with the guilt of having wiped out the human race. For an additional sting, Vandal himself is personally well-versed in time travel science (cf. "The Savage Time"), but the local [[Our Time Travel Is Different|rules of time travel]] prevent one from [[Never the Selves Shall Meet|travelling to an era where one already exists]]—which for the immortal Savage is basically ''all of history'', which is why in "The Savage Time" [[Write Back to the Future|he merely sent information to his past self.]]

{{quote|'''Superman''': How did you get here?

* In ''[[Generator Rex]]'', Van Kliess was sent back in time by Breach, and an episode focuses on how he got back to the present. While it looks like he's getting in a time machine during his travels between the various eras, it's later revealed that {{spoiler|it's not a time machine, but a stasis chamber - [[And I Must Scream|and he was ''aware'' of each passing second]] during the the hundreds of years of waiting}}. And all while being chased by {{spoiler|Breach, who had been turned into}} a mysterious energy force.

* [[And I Must Scream]] and this trope are played for laughs in ''[[Darkwing Duck]]''. DW goes back in time with Quackerjack's Timetop back to the time of the Dinosaurs. After much humor and hijinks, one of the dinosaur scientists pumps the Timetop and sends Quackerjack back to the present, leaving DW stuck in the past until a Dino-scientst drops him in ''amber'' (he was making pancakes). Cue the passage of time, with DW frozen, eyes open... Launchpad and present-day scientists find DW and crack open his amber tomb, finally freeing him - at which point he shivers and says [[Funny Moments (Sugar Wiki)|"Does anyone know what eon it is?"]]

* In the [[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003 series)|2003 ''Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'']] cartoon, when the Utroms realized they had crash-landed on a planet where the technology was too primitive to repair their ship or build another, they decided this was their only solution; they knew humanity would eventually evolve and advance in science and technology to a point where they could use it with theirs. Being a very long-lived species, this eventually paid off after centuries of waiting, when they finally succeeded with the heroes' help.